One chapter is closing — and another is opening — as Stanford University moves toward the creation of its first "bookless library."
Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering.
"The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and checking out books — and much more about research and discovery," said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development at Stanford Libraries.
Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity.
For forty years, the metal shelves of the modest Physics and Engineering libraries were magnets to thousands of students and faculty, including Nobel Prize winners Douglas Osheroff, Robert Laughlin and Steven Chu, who now directs the U.S. Department of Energy.