Harvard’s libraries deal with disruptive change

An article by Jonathan Shaw in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine discusses libraries and the Internet, and where they might be headed. A snippet:

The journals themselves have grown in number and quantity of articles, but “the amount of data being produced and analyzed in large, curated databases,” Kohane [director of the medical library] says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude what appears in printed publications.” The fact that students and doctors don’t think to use this digital material is an international problem. “Even at Harvard,” where “we spend millions of dollars” annually for access to the databases, “many of the medical staff, graduate students, and residents don’t know how to use…,” he pauses. “Well, it’s worse than that. They don’t know that they exist.”