News Report #1

“Digital Bookmobile”
By: Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe, August 28, 2008.
url: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/08/28/check_out_the_librarys_high_tech_tools/

Accessing information, for most of us, is easier than ever and a company based out of Cleveland Ohio “Over drive” along with the Boston Public Library are making access even simpler. These two have teamed up and set up shop outside in Boston’s City Hall Plaza to bring digital information to the masses. The Bookmobile with shockingly, no books is offering the Boson area library goers another alternative to paper and ink. The bookmobile is informing people of the other resources now available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week with an impressive display of the digital catalog, audio book alley, e-book experience, video lounge, and a gadget gallery where patrons can become equated with digital devices.

Is this online digital library really the wave of the future? Being able to download entire books to your iPod or blackberry, never having to leave your home computer to get a resource for a paper? Don’t get me wrong technology has given us numerous opportunities and having these online resources is instant gratification at its finest but it all seems so impersonal to me. Whatever happened to people as resources? Librarians who may be able to recommend the perfect book for your English paper will be lost in this sea of information streaming from your computer.
They say that the library of the future will be simply a computer screen of infinite information. The question I have is, is the computer going to recommend a book to me based on what it thought of it, like my local library staff would? Or who is going to do the children’s corner readings every Wednesday night, Is a digital voice and online material going to replace everything I hold dear about libraries? I love to just find a quiet spot in a library and get a book that someone has recommended and read for awhile, will I be sitting in a computer lab in the near future? I for one, hope that real people not virtual people and real books not e books, still remain imperative in our libraries.