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Cushing Academy's library
 
2:01
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  Good afternoon.   I am the Headmaster of Cushing Academy and would be happy to answer your questions about today's article in the Globe regarding our decision to go digital with the school's library.
2:10
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  Thank you for your good questions.   I'll try to answer the three I just received in this one comment.   Every new technology entails gains and loss.   Illuminated manuscripts were more beautiful than printed books, but Gutenberg's movable type allowed for the great democritization of knowledge that led to modern democracy itself.   Electronic books will make it possible for everyone on the planet to soon have access to all of human culture in the palm of their hand.

We at Cushing LOVE books - so much that we want our students to have access to millions of them anywhere on campus, not just twenty thousand in the library.   We also are not eliminating books altogether.   Teachers can still assign printed books in their courses and students are encouraged to read printed books for pleasure.

We are deaccessioning our library's printed books (donating them to other schools) so that we can use that beautiful space for an interactive teacher/student learning venue we can provide nowhere else on campus.   Meanwhile, every classroom has now, in a sense, become a library with millions of books available on smart boards and laptops.
2:14
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  

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.

2:15
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  In terms of the cost of the cybercafe, we want to provide a pleasant venue for teachers and students to relax and share ideas.   We actually anticipate the coffe house will pay for itself in short order.
2:16
[Comment From Rebecca K.]
Headmaster Tracy,
2:19
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  

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.

2:22
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  We don't hate books.   We love books at Cushing.   By deciding to focus on electronic access to books in our school library, we are hardly eliminating our students' encounter with books in the classrooms, elsewhere on campus (the departments had "first dibs" on all printed books before they were donated to other schools) and in many other venues of their lives.

Besides, this is about access to books via one format or another, not about not having books.
All of Cushing's administrators spent the summer testing Kindles and Sony Readers.   We fell in love with them and read all of our novels on them now.   It is great to be on a plane with hundreds of books in your hand!
2:26
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  Am I concerned that students with laptops will multi-task rather than staying focused in the classroom?
That is certainly a concern, but we have found in the three years since we have become a laptop school that students actually stay more focused in the classroom, because there are multiple ways to interact as an entire class via laptops and smartboards.   Our teachers have embraced the technology and tell me that they now depend on it to teach optimally.   Also, our academic support teachers tell us that going digital allows them to help students with learning differences to web information in ways that are more accessible to multiple intelligences.
2:27
[Comment From Rebecca K.]
Hi Headmaster Tracy. I am a professor at UMass Boston who will be teaching an interdisciplinary course this fall on Technology, Progress, and Transformation. One of the technologies my students and I will be discussing is Kindle, and the idea of digitized books. So this is a very timely article. I would like to ask you: What do you see as the biggest challenge ahead, in transforming your library to a digital learning center?
2:29
James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing -  

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.

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