The First Bookless, Fully Electronic Library

© 2010 Peter Free

 

30 October 2010

 

In the perfect subject, too

 

The University of Texas at San Antonio announced that its Applied Engineering and Technology Library is:

 

“the first completely bookless library on a university or college campus.”

 

No printed volumes are stored at the AET Library; students have access to its 425,000 ebooks and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions . . . . from anywhere on- or off-campus.

 

© 2010 David Rapp, [infotech] ─ UTSA Announces “Bookless Library”, Library Journal 135(17): 16 (15 October 2010)

 

Nostalgia (?) for dusty volume searches of the past

 

Some among the older set remember laboriously searching hand- or typewritten indexed card catalogs.

 

Followed by:

 

(a) long hikes to sometimes hidden segments of upper floors,

 

using occasional windows and outside landmarks to figure out where we were in place and time relative to the non-library world;

 

(b) confusing Dewey Decimal hunts;

 

(c) dusty volume sorting;

 

(d) peeks at the last stamped check-out dates,

 

often faded and many years before;

 

and

 

(e) crushing disappointment when the promised book or periodical was not there.

 

Occasionally, those searches were like children’s Easter egg hunts, with bright-in-meaning trophies at their ends.

 

The mini-moral?

 

Time passes and categories of once meaning-filled human experience with it.