This commentary is by Alis Headlam of Rutland, who holds a doctorate in education, taught at Castleton State College as an adjunct in the education department for a number of years and at the College of St. Joseph in Rutland as a full-time professor and adjunct.
Dive into a deep enough hole and you may never be able to come back up. That is what the proposed dismantling of state university libraries threatens as reported by VTDigger.
Destroying or redistributing valuable resources is not the answer to providing a better, more rigorous education. Once these materials disappear from a library, they will never be able to be recovered. They will be lost forever and education will take a deep dive into a black hole from which it may not be able to survive.
Parwinder Grewal, who will take the reins of the state university system July 1, will oversee five campuses around the state. He has announced that moving to an “all-digital academic library” will provide greater access to information for students.
The message to students — that all information worthy of note can be found on the internet in digital sources — is misleading, provocative and dangerous. Looking at what has happened nationally should provide a clear understanding that there are great dangers with overuse of digital tools. Social media platforms have already provided easy access to misinformation and false narratives.
Conducting complex research often involves having several texts open at the same time for comparison and confirmation of material. Digital access does not facilitate this unless there are several digital tools available.
Good research is like being a detective. Using books as well as some digital sources provide valuable tools that lead to greater thinking and more profound conclusions. Books and journals are invaluable to this process.
To enable the use of unvetted resources as part of an academic exercise threatens the very essence of quality education. Using only digital resources complicates the process of ensuring that resources are legitimate. Many digital sites appear legitimate when in truth they are not part of authentic studies.
There is a vetting that takes place before books and journals are published that is secured when they are printed for use. This is not always the case when information is posted digitally.
Greater reliance on digital text enables the possibility of plagiarizing longer and more complex texts. Copy-and-paste tools in the digital world make this a simple process. Hand-copying from a book or journal is far more labor intensive.
Plagiarizing is a dangerous tool that allows students to pretend they know something they do not understand. It can lead to greater falsehoods and poor conclusions.
Nationally educators, librarians and researchers should be outraged that higher education could become so compromised by singularly destroying historical references in preference for those that have been chosen for digitization.
Destroying our libraries with invaluable books, journals and other resources does not make sense in a world that needs to learn from its past as it moves forward into the future. This proposed move does not expand access, but rather limits it.
