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The trend of purchasing and viewing books through an online environment has had a profound effect on school libraries and their collections, changing both the nature of the catalogue of materials held and the user of the libraries themselves. School libraries, like all businesses involved in the production and sale of books, are corks “floating on a digital stream”, and as the digital world changes libraries adapt to the environment (Shatzkin, 2015, para. 6).
The school library catalogue was once the font of all knowledge, just as book stores were the primary place of purchase for printed media. Today, students can complete their assessment tasks without stepping foot inside the physical building of the library. We are facing the same challenge that books stores today face, where our quality resources are ignored for the simplicity of a google search (Shatzkin, 2016, para. 13). Our customers, students, want ease of access to quality resources. We need to be able to provide them with electronic resources, such as databases and online journals that meet their needs, and at the same time teach them to how to evaluate the information they find for ‘free’ and remind them of the value of printed books.
The way we purchase for our collections is having a profound effect on the reading environment of our society. Once you could find a bookstore anyway. Now you have to hunt for one, as they slip into the state of becoming endangered species. We have to admit that when we opt to purchase our books through online companies, such as Book Depository or Amazon, we are squeezing the physical presence of the little bookshop down the road out, even though that may be the very place that we were promoted the book before purchasing online (Shatzkin, 2016, para. 21). When these stores go, so does the passionate individual who has possibly encouraged many of our students to become readers in the first place by recommending the “magic book”, as Mem Fox terms it, to the parent of a reluctant reader that sets their children on a life long journey of the joys of reading.
References
Shatzkin, M. (2015, November 17). Big focus at DBW 2016 on the tech companies that are shaping the world the book business has to live in [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.idealog.com/blog/big-focus-at-dbw-2016-on-the-tech-companies-that-are-shaping-the-world-the-book-business-has-to-live-in/
Shatzkin, M. (2016, January 10). Book publishing lives in an environment shaped by larger forces and always has [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.idealog.com/blog/book-publishing-lives-in-an-environment-shaped-by-larger-forces-and-always-has/