Paper Lion

Sooner or later, someone will attack the amount of money you spend on print materials, as opposed to electronic resources. Remember, you are the expert here. As much as the challenge may be a criticism of your collection policy, it's primarily a criticism of your expertise. Defend that expertise politely and respectfully—but also relentlessly. You'll want to respond to your critics aggressively. The following arguments will put your antagonists on the defensive.

Point out that research demonstrates the value of a balanced collection, particularly the value of print materials. Prepare a list of corroborative research studies that you've found in professional journals and keep the list in a handy place, say, in your pocket calendar or Personal Digital Assistant. Better yet, memorize the essence of at least six of those studies so that you can present them without a moment's hesitation. Afterwards, ask your critics to cite some empirical evidence of electronic superiority in fostering student achievement. Guess what? I bet they can't.

At some point, someone will probably characterize print materials as a thing of the past. Challenge that assertion immediately. Ask what evidence they have that print is in decline; then lay it on your adversaries when they can't produce it. Inform them that print isn't dead, dying, or even ill. In fact, book sales in the U.S. are increasing, exceeding $25 billion for the first time in 2000, and publishing is growing too. Even popular sources of information about computers—publications such as PC Magazine and PC World —have a monthly print circulation of about a million.

You can also borrow some of the thought-provoking arguments on copyrighted materials advanced by Thomas Mann, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress (see Journal of Academic Librarianship, July 2001). If a profit is to be made from copyrighted materials on the Internet, he says, online resources must by necessity limit visitors' access. Furthermore, copyright restrictions mean that free access to everything published probably will never happen on the Internet. Libraries, on the other hand, freely make copyrighted materials available to their users through their print collections.

Mann makes another persuasive point that may surprise your critics: exclusive use of electronic resources, he says, may actually diminish students' abilities to understand lengthy works. Today's students, he argues, are comfortable with computers, but that's not the same as saying that they're comfortable reading and absorbing long works on a monitor. The majority of the time, says Mann, youngsters interact with screen displays that don't require long attention spans or higher-level interpretative skills. This is dangerous, because we want students to move through the hierarchy of awareness that constitutes education—proceeding from the acquisition of information to knowledge to understanding to wisdom.

When it comes to readability, electronic media can't compete with print. In fact, the first thing most students do when they locate an electronic text is to print it out—and with good reason. The resolution on a monitor is lower than a printer's resolution, and magazines, books, and newspapers are printed at even higher densities. Not only are printed pages much easier to read than electronic displays—but they're easier on the eyes. Small wonder that reading from a monitor is up to 30 percent slower than reading the same text on a printed page. Also, the more comfortable we are with the text, the more likely we are to engage in sustained reading.

Don't let me mislead you: spending an excessive amount on print materials makes no more sense than spending all our money on electronic resources. The key is to maintain a spending balance. Defending that balance may keep your critics off balance.