It’s a familiar lament among community-college librarians: When students have access to Google and Wikipedia (and, at this point, most do), they tend to start acting as if their campus libraries don’t even exist. …
In a presentation at the League on Innovation’s Conference on Information Technology, Sinclair administrators heralded their own library  which recently reopened after an $8-million overhaul  as "the library of the future." The building does its best to back up that strong talk: Its features include a commercial printing service, a Starbucks cafe, and, for what it’s worth, a collection of books that remained almost completely intact during the library’s redesign.
And to bring back students, Sinclair brought in Starbucks and toyed with the library’s sightlines, attempting to create a more convivial atmosphere in a building that had previously had little use as a social space.
The college has stuck by its collection of books, even as it moved many of its holdings into a much smaller facility while the library was being gutted and rebuilt. But Sinclair jettisoned many of its subscriptions to print journals, replacing them with cheaper electronic alternatives in order to save space. ÂBrock Read
This article was submited by Marti Atkinson from the Chronicle of Higher Education