With growing popularity with non-print materials such as ebooks and online databases, I always wanted to know what would happen with print materials. Is it worth buying new print materials when we're moving towards ebooks and online databases? According to Ellen McNair in Print to Digital, print materials may still be useful depending on the school district. Some schools may not have the budget to have both a digital and a print source available for students or they have both but don't have the money to continually invest in nonprint materials since they're expected to have both print and nonprint. This is true in the schools that I've observed in; because of a tight budget, they're unable to have ebooks or even online databases.
But if you do decide to have ebooks, how do you decide what print materials to keep and which ones to let go so you can get online. This can be done through inventory. You will not only know what you have in your collection, but you can also know it well enough to determine which books are out of date and which ones are good enough to keep (Inventory for the School Library). This would definitely be helpful to know in the science section since new information is constantly coming out, causing the print materials to be out of date before they even hit the shelves. Certain books should still be kept in print such as ancient civilizations, narrative nonfiction, Civil War, and popular new fiction (Print to Digital) since students (and teachers) still use these topics in class and want students to use print materials.
Choosing books is a very important job for the school library media specialist. We want students to love reading and entice them back in again and again in order to discover the love of reading. But how do we do that if books are old, ugly and well, unreadable? Darcy Lohmiller says that as librarians we really do need to judge the book by its cover. If we don't like the cover of a book, then why would we expect students to read? Because we're in an age filled with digital materials, our print materials need to be catchy, else we're wasting our money for them. The book covers need to reflect the words in the book and be appropriate to its genre.
Ebooks should also be considered because they reach students who wouldn't have read normally. Chris Gustafson mentions that some students prefer ebooks because of a variety of reasons: They can make the font bigger, they read longer books because an ereader doesn't really tell you how long the book is, and they want to read more in general. This is a big plus to include ebooks in the library, but we also need to think about how we're going to incorporate them into the library and whether or not students know ebooks are available.
It's a lot to think about, especially if you're a smaller library who runs on a tight budget. Is it worth it to get ebooks for the students, or should we just continue getting the print materials?
You are correct, there is a lot to think about!
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