College Students Still Find Libraries Relevant

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Students are back on college campuses around Wisconsin.Those who attend UW-Green Bay have access to the newly crowned public “Library of the Year” as deemed by the Wisconsin Library Association.Even with computers, students still make use of Library facilities.

Now that libraries no longer have to dedicate floor space to so-called “dead tree”, or paper copies of journals and other publications they’re becoming places students can get together on collaborative projects, according to UW Green Bay’s Director of the Cofrin Library, Paula Ganyard.

“How we define a book today, it’ll probably be something they see in a museum,” she says.

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Ganyard says it might not happen in the near future, but a century from now paper copies of books may be history.

The Cofrin Library was named the state’s Public Library of the Year in part due to its adaptation of digital technology.Ganyard says libraries still offer access to publications students can’t afford to get on their own.

“You can’t just go and get a free copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association,” she says.”That you do still have to pay for.There are plenty of journals, thousands and thousands of books that you can’t just get by Googling something.”

UWGB’s library has waived its interlibrary loan fee.Ganyard says it was only one dollar per article, but it still created a “have’s and have not’s” situation.

“I’ve had a lot of faculty members comment to me how appreciative they were that we got rid of it, because they could change their assignments now where they would use to try to do things that they knew were here in the library,” she says.

The Wisconsin Library Association says there are hundreds of public libraries in the same category as UWGB, but it doesn’t disclose how many were nominated for Library of the Year.