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HUGO, Minn.—In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read.

Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It's a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.

Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.

Later this year Mesa, Ariz., plans to open a new "express" library in a strip-mall, open three days a week, with outdoor kiosks to dispense books and DVDs at all hours of the day. Palm Harbor, Fla., meanwhile, has offset the impact of reduced hours by installing glass-front vending machines that dispense DVDs and popular books.

The wave of innovation is aided by companies that have created new machines designed to help libraries save on labor. For instance, Evanced Solutions, an Indianapolis company that makes library software, this month is starting test trials of a new vending machine it plans to start selling early next year.

"It's real, and the book lockers are great," said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. "Many of us are having to reduce hours as government budgets get cut, and this enables people to get to us after hours."

Long before there were iPads and Kindles changing communication as we know it, there were other disruptive technologies and breakout information delivery systems. Like the printing press. And the Guttenberg Bible. WSJ's Marshall Crook offers a brief history of the book.

Some library directors worry that such machines are the first step toward a future in which the physical library—along with its reference staffs and children's programs—fades from existence. James Lund, director of the Red Wing Public Library in Red Wing, Minn., recently wrote skeptically about the "vending library" in Library Journal, a trade publication.

"The basis of the vending machine is to reduce the library to a public-book locker," Mr. Lund said in an interview. "Our real mission is public education and public education can't be done from a vending machine. It takes educators, it takes people, it takes interaction."

Public libraries are an American creation. The first was introduced by Benjamin Franklin, who created a co-operative library funded by people who used it. The first tax-supported library was founded in Peterborough, N.H., in 1833, according to Larry Nix, a retired librarian and library historian. Today there are about 16,700 public library buildings in the country.

Robo-libraries are still a relatively rare sight. Public Information Kiosk Inc., a company in Germantown, Md. that sells kiosks and vending machines to libraries, has had 25 orders for a book-and-DVD-dispensing machine that the company introduced last year. Fred Goodman, the company's chief executive, estimated that, overall, there are no more than a few dozen vending machines now in operation. Still, he expects to sell at least twice as many units in 2011.

Hugo is a town of 13,700 people on the northern fringes of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area that has seen its population double in the last decade. But surrounding Washington County is struggling to build the infrastructure to support the newcomers: Over the past year, the county's nine-branch library system has cut the equivalent of two full-time workers to trim costs.

And yet, the system is popular: Visits last year rose 10% compared to 2007.

The combination of greater demand and leaner resources is visible in the wait list for some popular books. The system has 32 copies of "Freedom," the new Jonathan Franzen novel set in nearby St. Paul, but 321 people on the waiting list—a 10 to 1 ratio. In flusher times, the wait-list ratio was usually closer to 5 to 1 for popular titles.

The 20 lockers of Library Express won't solve that problem, but they have made the library more convenient. The county is adding 20 more lockers next month.

Melody Baker, 47, recently used the lockers to check out the best seller "Eat, Pray, Love,"—"I had to see what the fuss was about," she said.

The library's main branch is five miles from her house, but Ms. Baker, who is a personal care attendant for an autistic child, says it's hard to get there during business hours when the library is open. "It's difficult for me to get up there," she said of the library's main branch. "This makes it much easier to get library material."

Zaune wrote:The Wall St Journal

Public libraries are an American creation. The first was introduced by Benjamin Franklin, who created a co-operative library funded by people who used it. The first tax-supported library was founded in Peterborough, N.H., in 1833, according to Larry Nix, a retired librarian and library historian. Today there are about 16,700 public library buildings in the country.

Posted without comment.

thejester wrote:My experience is the complete opposite TBH. The 'internet generation' (in Australia at least) is so conditioned to the idea that analysis/critical thinking is what's important that they totally ignore actual data and find it totally bewildering when they're assessed on their knowledge of facts. That their analysis is often fundamentally flawed because of this comes as a total surprise. I just finished marking a tranche of essays in which most students displayed a decent grasp of the strategic problems of the American Revolutionary War and American Civil War. But because they didn't actually know much about the war (and fuck finding out) beyond the broad strokes of strategy outlined in the course literature, they'd come out with statements like 'the Confederacy adopted an offensive-defensive strategy in which they took the strategic defensive but the tactical offensive' - which is true to a point, but completely ignores Lee's two offensives into the North in 1862 and 1863.

Formless wrote:What about poor people with unreliable or no access to the internet?

Formless wrote:when school work demands a laptop at minimum if only because their batteries last longer?

Melchior wrote:Sorry, what? Typical tablets have around ten hours of battery life, a laptop is lucky to have five, especially one costing under a thousand dollars. You should have said that the ergonomics of doing productive work on tablets are terrible to barely adequate.

Zaune wrote:

Melchior wrote:Sorry, what? Typical tablets have around ten hours of battery life, a laptop is lucky to have five, especially one costing under a thousand dollars. You should have said that the ergonomics of doing productive work on tablets are terrible to barely adequate.

Depends on the laptop; some newer ten-inch ones are good for at least eight as long as you're not doing anything power-intensive.

Melchior wrote:

Formless wrote:when school work demands a laptop at minimum if only because their batteries last longer?

Sorry, what? Typical tablets have around ten hours of battery life, a laptop is lucky to have five, especially one costing under a thousand dollars. You should have said that the ergonomics of doing productive work on tablets are terrible to barely adequate.

Formless wrote:

Melchior wrote:

Formless wrote:when school work demands a laptop at minimum if only because their batteries last longer?

Sorry, what? Typical tablets have around ten hours of battery life, a laptop is lucky to have five, especially one costing under a thousand dollars. You should have said that the ergonomics of doing productive work on tablets are terrible to barely adequate.

Your battery life with a laptop is even longer than that because you can actually plug it in while using it. Doing so with a tablet is harder on their batteries and hastens their dissipation rate (or at least I have it on good authority from people who design electronics that this is the case).

Besides, that was just one basic problem. There are numerous others-- for instance, the lack of a proper word processor (and even if there was, like you say good fucking luck typing out a 500 word document on that dinky touchscreen). Or Powerpoint. Or any number of other crucial software tools that school requires. Hell, the math classes I've taken in the past all use custom software, mostly Java based, that I can't see using on a tablet even if it ran on one. Even though I am quite happy with the tablet I now own, it simply isn't up to the task of replacing my desktop for school work, and I find it hard to believe anyone who has spent time in a classroom in the past five years and has used a tablet since would think it is.

Formless wrote:How many years ago was that? And are you talking college or just HS/Primary school?

But yes, even in High School we were asked to learn how to do power point presentations and do research with computers. They made a big deal out of the fact that they had computer labs available for everyone plus the library computers, because they recognized that not everyone had them at home and actually wanted a working solution to that problem. Wasn't a cheap investment, but definitely worthwhile. Because they did want to solve this issue, not ignore it.

Formless wrote:And how does expecting that everyone does help anyone when this expectation is in fact false? You may not have met this those people, but that says more about you than the world. I was talking about high school, not college, which you probably can't afford if you are poor enough.

And just to be clear, its the assumption that people have experience with computers outside of school that bothers me.

Jub wrote:

Formless wrote:And how does expecting that everyone does help anyone when this expectation is in fact false? You may not have met this those people, but that says more about you than the world. I was talking about high school, not college, which you probably can't afford if you are poor enough.

And just to be clear, its the assumption that people have experience with computers outside of school that bothers me.

I'm going to guess that every north american and western european school has computer labs, usually multiple labs and library PC's, with some districts doing a student laptop program. In addition most public libraries have public use lab if not two, and public lessons on computer basics. Add to this the fact that a cheapo desktop/laptop might run you $300 if cost is the limiter and internet fees are modest - if you can't use free wifi; and I don't see how we should assume people won't have access to a PC if they have any inclination towards using one.

You say the poor can't afford these, and I agree in the worst areas of the US that might be true. But I grew up with a single Mother who needed income assistance and by the time the early 2000's came around we had dial up and a modest PC and there were free PC's I could use in local youth centers, at school, at friend's houses, or the local library. I was poor and we managed because it was important that we kept up with the age.

So why should we design our education around what the least can afford at the expense of elevating it for even the low end median?