Last Friday, we had a reatreat to discuss Collection Development with the Collection Development Committee. We met with some of the group leaders, Bob Alan and I gave a preliminary presentation of the data we're presenting at the Charleston Conference in November, and we talked about what strategy we need to take to balance the materials budget this year. As we were doing this, I started to think about both the access to our collection and our collection itself.
In preparation for Google scanning up to 500,000 of our books, we're going to get our bibliographic and holding records in good order. We need to barcode items that need barcoding so that the holdings records are accessible. We know we have at least 200,000 books and serials to barcode. We also need to spend some time analyzing what we're buying and how they're being used. Finally, we have so many treasures in our special collections. Should we be pooling resources from around the Libraries to bring these treasures to light?
Once we get all this work done and Google scans our books, will people read the digital copies? I think they will. I watch my 14 year old read story after story on her Mac. She reads more on her Mac than she does in print now. That 14 year old will hopefully be a college freshman in 2011. Will software exist to more easily read ebooks? Will we all have ebook readers? Will we be using Amazon's kindle? Will Google have invented a reader? I'm thinking we might want to do a pilot in the next year or two and test out some of these readers.
I'll write more about our collections and the google project as time goes on.