Cushing is a laptop school.   Every student has a laptop for use in the classroom; those on financial aid are provided laptops free of charge.   Every classroom also has a Smart Board, with direct access to the Internet.

All of the books, journals, and data that our library will have available electronically will now be immediately available via wi fi to every student instantaneously in every classroom - and, in fact, anywhere on campus.

We also are providing Kindles and Sony Readers for students who want to read in a more eye-friendly format.   Currently, we are providing 18 of those, because we think students will do most of their research on their laptops.   We will purchase as many as we think the community needs as we get a sense this year of the demand for Kindles and Sony Readers circulating from the library.

Our research found that, of a library of 20,000 printed books, only 48 were circulating at any given time, on average, and more than thirty of those were children's books taken out by the families that live on campus.   When we spoke with students, they told us that they were not using the books on-site for research, either.   Teachers confirmed that students mostly cited on-line sources in their papers.
We decided that we would provide students with much richer on-line database sources, including access to full-text, peer-reviewed journals, to teach them how to select out the most reliable content from all of the junk that they will encounter as students and professionals in the 21st century.
The challenge today is how to teach students to cope with too much information, how to separate the wheat from the chaffe.

Thank you for your comment.   One of the biggest challenges ahead is to work out the copyright issues that are holding up some of the access and standardization, especially for new material.   Cushing hopes to work with Amazon and other companies to build models that are profitable for them and feasible for schools.

We are providing all of this free of charge to each student.   Cushing is admittedly an affluent private school with extensive resources, so we are in something of a privileged position in this regard.

We do believe, though, that pioneers like Cushing will build the paradigm that, as costs come down with technological progress, will make this available to even the poorest schools in the developing world at accessible cost.

First of all, we are keeping about 1,000 books that have been donated; we will always honor that donation.

You entirely miss the point about the use of the library.   The library is being restructured to facilitate more faculty/student use for study and interaction than has ever taken place there before.