Book Value

DESPITE TECHNOLOGICAL advances suggesting digital media will kill the book, printed pages live on at Dartmouth. Last year the Colleges library collections grew by 1.5 percent, a paltry-sounding figure until you realize it represents the shelving of 47,000 new books alongside the 2.5 million that already call Dartmouth home. That's about 12 new books for every undergrad—or enough new books to cover three football fields if they were laid out flat on the ground.

"Books are important and print is still valuable, even if it doesn't dominate the way it used to," says Carol Magenau of the Baker-Berry Library acquisitions staff. Although print is still expanding in the Dartmouth library system as a whole (Baker-Berry alone added 34,576 books in 2007), book collections are not growing in all the libraries on campus. Feldberg Business & Engineering Library cut the space allotted for books from three floors to one. Though it added nearly a thousand new books in 2007, the print collection at Feldberg actually shrunk as librarians discarded more than a thousand titles.

Digital media does eclipse print in the category of serials (magazines, newspapers, journals and annuals).

Dartmouth students have more than 44,000 electronic serials and databases, plus an additional 182,000 e-books, at their fingertips. And while the collection of printed serials continues to increase, digital continues to grow faster as scholarly journals drop their print versions and go electronic.