Though students may be familiar with the bright blue stacks of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library (OWHL), home to nearly 120,000 print books, few may be aware of the recently introduced e-reading devices. Students can now access one iPad, two NOOKS, three Kindles, five Sony Readers, 12 iPod nanos and tens of thousands electronic book and audio book resources through the OWHL.
The iPad is on two-hour reserve, meaning that students can borrow the iPad for use in the library through the same limited “check-out” system they would use for a calculus or physics textbook.
The OWHL has also begun putting QR barcode stickers on reference sources in the Garver Room to indicate if a book is available electronically.
If a smart phone or iPad user takes a photo of the QR barcode stickers it will automatically connect them to a link that corresponds to the e-version of the source material according to Elisabeth Tully, Director of the OWHL.
Through OWHL iPad, students can access e-subscriptions to various newspapers and magazines, including “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal,” “The New Yorker” and “Wired.”
The OWHL has also started a weekly iPad tutorial class for faculty members this fall. Every Friday, faculty members share useful applications or iPad functions that they have come across or utilized in their classrooms at the meeting.
The class was established after around 90 faculty members purchased iPads last spring through a school-sponsored program that supported half of the cost.
Kathrine Aydelott, Instructional Librarian at the OWHL, shared her discovery of the Diigo Browser application at a recent meeting.
Aydelott said, “I was looking for a [browser] that was a little bit more efficient at handling bookmarks than the Safari browser that comes with the iPad and found Diigo. I thought other people might find it useful.”
The library pre-ordered its first Kindle the day Amazon announced the eReader in 2006. “We were very eager to try the technology out,” said Tully.
Initially, the library made the Kindles available only to faculty and staff on campus, not certain how they would be able to manage loaning the eReaders to students.
Having eBooks available on Kindles was “so different from the way [the OWHL] had purchased, catalogued, and made accessible books in the past,” according to Tully.
“Then we found that, not infrequently, a student would be doing a research paper and would need a book that either we didn’t have, was checked out or was available electronically,” explained Tully, “And they possibly had let the deadline get a little tight so we ended up purchasing the book on demand and loaned the Kindle [to the student].”
Subscriptions to digital library services such as ebrary and OverDrive account for much of the OWHL’s electronic and audio book collections.
This September, OverDrive reached an agreement with Amazon, making its collections compatible with Kindles and devices such as the iPad that are able to run Kindle applications.
OWHL began its electronic book collection in the early 2000s, buying electronic versions of reference books, mainly encyclopedias.
“You don’t really want to take an encyclopedia chapter to bed,” said Tully. “But when we saw the Kindle we thought, ‘This is the breakthrough device. Now people will be reading books on this’.”
Members of the community have also explored the OverDrive collection through the Kindle application for the iPad.
Aydelott said, “We have to be really mindful as librarians that we’re living in a particular moment with particular technology, that [updates in technology] are happening all the time, so we have to start being there and meeting up to explore them.”
“[The OWHL staff] wanted to make sure we knew how to use it, so if people came in and asked, we could support them. We downloaded the app, we searched for books and we selected [titles to borrow], which was kind of fun,” said Tully.
Though Tully appreciates the immediate access made possible by new technology, she said, “One possible concern is that as a lifelong library user, I cannot tell you how many times I went in the stacks to look for a particular book but then got distracted by the book next to it or the book next to that.”
“Serendipity has led me to a lot of books, and it only works if you’re standing there and you’re browsing,” she continued. “I don’t know how exactly we can recreate that experience for kids in the virtual world. We want to make sure that kids don’t settle for what’s quick and easy, when with just a little bit more digging, there might be jewels that they could uncover if they pushed a little deeper.”
Tully said that the OWHL is always eager to adapt to new technology.
“In some organizations, the principal barrier to that kind of [technological] change is people’s attitude, and that isn’t true here. People on this staff are really excited about the potential of technology for helping us do our jobs better,” she said.
