Report: “Copy Machines in [Academic] Libraries Are ‘Going the Way of the Dodo’—Slowly”

From Jennifer Howard at EdSurge:

“Copiers seem to be going the way of the dodo, slowly,” says Stephanie Walker, dean of libraries and information resources at the University of North Dakota.
The switch from copiers to scanners makes sense in the hybrid digital/print environment students and faculty operate in now. There’s also a financial incentive for academic libraries looking to economize and streamline operations and provide patrons with the services they most need.
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The library staff first pulled all the public copiers from the university’s medical library and then, several months ago, from the main library. “Nobody complained,” Walker says. “The student response was a giant shrug.”
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At Brooklyn College, part of the CUNY system, the switch from copiers to scanners led to an excellent opportunity for the library to get creative and do a good turn for other institutions at the same time. Stephanie Walker, who was chief librarian there at the time, actively promoted an entrepreneurial approach to solving library and IT challenges.
Howard Spivak is the current director of academic information technologies at the college. The big problem, he says, wasn’t moving away from copiers but finding a scanner that was good enough and still cheap and simple enough for general use.

Read the Complete Article (approx. 1470 words)

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