Is digitisation the new circulation? Borrowing trends, digitisation and the nature of reading in US and UK libraries

To explore the belief that digital technology has created a steep and irreversible decline in traditional library use, particularly in borrowing from public and higher education library print collections, with a concomitant effect on familiar patterns of reading and reflection. If digital technology has led to a fundamental change in the way young people in HE process information, should traditional assumptions about library use and educational reading habits be abandoned?

This is a comparative analysis of statistics of library use available in the public domain in the USA and UK.

That reading habits shown in the use of public libraries are arguably conservative in nature; and that recent statistics for the circulation of print stock in US and UK university libraries indisputably show year on year increases, not decreases, except where the digitisation of print originals has provided a generous supply of effective digital surrogates for print holdings. The nature of reading has not changed fundamentally in nature. But where copyright law permits large‐scale provision of digital collections to be derived from print originals, these will readily displace borrowing from print collections, leading to lower circulation figures of hard copy items.

This paper asserts that the restrictive nature of UK copyright law, which is demonstrably backward by international standards, is a major factor inhibiting university teachers from helping their students migrate from print to digital media. This assertion should be researched in greater depth, with a view to using such research to influence the development of future intellectual property legislation in the UK.

Because of the essentially conservative nature of reflective reading for educational purposes, digitisation programmes offer an important way forward for academic library service development. Library managers should not underestimate the persistent demand for traditional reading materials: where such materials are provided in digital or print formats, in most cases the digital formats will be preferred; but where high quality educational resources are only available in print, there is no evidence that the format of alternative digital media is in itself sufficient to lure students away from quality content.

This paper questions some of the more casual assumptions about the “death” of traditional library services.