However, there is still a delay in borrowing so I’d love to see us go together on a e-book plan with a portion of our budget (could be with just Williams or with our whole NExpress consortium). We’d pay more per title to have the book be available to all, unlimited users, but between all of us buying titles, we’d amass a good collection relevant for liberal arts colleges. (The Netlibrary experiment was a failure due to the wrong partners, 1 user at a time per book, and limitations of the NetLibrary platform). But the idea was good. If done within NExpress it would be very easy for our users since they already use it for print materials and get frustrated when they find something that they can’t access. But we would need to spend equal (or weighted shares) of money. As for the future, technology (the search tools) is still driving people back to the print (circulation of print books is strong) so it will probably be a combination of both for quite some time. Much more could be said. This would be a good brown bag topic.

I read an article a few weeks back about colleges in close proximity sharing public safety officers — that is radical. Sharing books is much more logical, but it’s important to factor in the environmental weight of less books versus more car/mail travel to get books places.