Crumlish Quoted on Paperless Library
19 August 2002 Crumlish Quoted on Paperless Library
The Des Moines Area Community College's West Des Moines campus opened last fall with the mission to collaborate with companies to beta test education technologies. Instead of a library, the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual materials and a few paper magazines but no books. An article on Wired.com titled Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College addressed the paper debate. Electronics are perfect for journals if you are looking for a tiny piece of information, like a paragraph or a few pages, said Bill Crumlish, library director. But when you have a topic that requires 300 pages to develop an argument or provide a history, books are the perfect container for something that requires that depth of exposition.