Print is dead?

We at the Libraries, and perhaps in particular the Engineering Library, have made a concerted effort over the last few years to purchase electronic journals, proceedings, technical reports, and books. We know this is what our faculty and students want, and the use of these materials shows it.




And though this did have an initial effect on the circulation of our print materials, which showed decline from the early part of the decade, more precipitously from 2003-2005 or so, we've seen a big rebound since 2005. In the last fiscal year, about 20,0000 books were checked-out in our library: that's just under 5 books per student. And then these books were renewed about 10,000 times!

Clearly, print isn't dead, at least in the Engineering Library. What drives the use of it? Well, probably a lot of factors, one of which would be enrollment in the College, but even that is not significant enough to single-handedly drive this increase (yes, we've run the numbers).



So, what does it mean? We think it means that people still need books! We will continue to concentrate on electronic resources, but as librarians we also love to see people using books.