Academic Libraries in a Digital Age

Conversations like this appear with increasing frequency among academics bridging the generational divides. Students increasingly see the library as mostly irrelevant, while faculty and librarians of a certain age cling to the security of an authoritative collection and familiar classification systems. Brought up on the web and the endless flow of marginally organized information that is CNN, MTV or ESPN -a flow that makes almost no distinction between the important and the trivial, fact and speculation, authority and gossip -students have little patience with the formal organizational structure of the library and the authority of the librarian.