Major Medical Library Closing Its Doors to Patrons and Moving to Digital Model — The Digital Shift via kwout
When you have only 100 people per day entering your physical library and checking out an average total of only 40 books per day but have have 35,000 daily digital downloads of articles it only makes sense to close your physical doors — even if you are the world renowned William H. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University.
By January 1, 2012, the John Hopkins Medical library will close its doors. The library already commits 95% of it’s acquisitions budget to electronic journals and databases so the closure was inevitable. If you really think about this, wouldn’t you rather have your Doctor, a scientist or a Medical researcher spending their time searching the data on their iPad than walking the stacks.
When the best of the best are going completely digital can the rest of the library world be that far behind?
While I would not have ranked these in the same order the following 10 reasons will point tablets overtaking laptops in the next year:
- Power consumption
- Viruses (lack of)
- Portability
- Cost effectiveness
- Online connection
- Available applications (especially on the iPad)
- User friendliness (my number 2 ranking)
- Bluetooth connectivity (my number 1 ranking)
- Efficiency
- Social integration
Laptops will still serve the purpose primarily as input devices at least until the tablets mature to the point were they do this better as well.
I have been following Simon Sinek’s blog and tweets and I really need to pass on this gem.
The responsibility of leadership is not taken, it’s given. Only when others choose to follow us can we truly lead.
Simon Sinek
While the simplicity of these statements are profound so are the challenge of living them.
