Interesting library stuff

I found something interesting when I was sifting through blog posts on Bloglines. There was a blog posted under Library Stuff weblog that caught my attention, titled, "School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history 'books'? The post was saying that schools are choosing to make their collection available on kindles and that a particular library in Massachusetts has noticed that only a small percentage of their collection was being checked out, making the decision to go digital quite easy. This caught my eye because just this semester in my Reference class, this very discussion arose. I think as a whole, the class decided that, while having things available electronically is nice and convienent, some still like to have the actual book in hand as they read rather than sitting at a computer or holding some other electronic device in thier hands while they read. I tend to agree, especially when it comes to long documents. I'd much rather have the actual item in my hands rather than try to read something electronically, especially when the reading requires quite a bit of time to finish.

Something else that caught my attention was a post discussing document rental online service for scientific, technical, and medical research. You pay a fee per article and you can have access to the articles through DeepDyve, sort of like what Netflix does with movie rentals. It sort of makes me wonder what will come out next as far as information technology is concerned.