Out of the Stacks

If you take the books out of a library, is it still a library? That’s the question the Georgia Institute of Technology pondered -- and eventually answered in the affirmative -- when administrators, faculty members and librarians began to define their vision of what the institute’s library should look like by 2020.  The most symbolic part of that transition is starting this month. Virtually all of the books in Georgia Tech’s collection -- more than 95 percent of them -- are headed to a cold storage facility, creating a shared collection with neighboring Emory University. But the more prominent changes are less visible, including a transformation of the library from a “big box filled with books” to a service organization with a large online presence. The institute’s partnership with Emory could even lay the foundation for a library consortium in the Atlanta area.