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Today, most UNH students come from a world in which digitization is a given. Junior Elizabeth Summers routinely checks from her computer to see if reserve books are available, so she doesn't waste time trekking to the library. A sociology major, Summers doesn't even bother with the library's periodical room because everything she wants is on EBSCOhost, a company that provides an electronic database of scores of thousands of academic journals and magazine articles. "It's insanely helpful," says Summers. For example, in order to build a graph of the relationship between runaway teens and family ties for her sociology of statistics class, she sorted through 50 hits to choose the 20 most relevant articles.

Summers says she still uses books, but she adds, "there are definitely people who don't." In many ways, UNH is becoming a paperless school. Grades are posted online in the password-protected Blackboard, an online course management system. There are no bills, just reminders e-mailed to students and authorized payers. Most teachers don't give out a syllabus on paper—it's all on Blackboard.

Just before spring break, Adam Karr, a junior psychology major, sat at one of the library's computers preparing for a statistics exam by checking out a sample test his professor had posted on Blackboard. There he can also check due dates, read class notes, view slides or PowerPoint presentations, or e-mail professors. Junior Emily Todd is majoring in history and uses her student ID number to access library databases from home. "It's very helpful because I live off-campus," she says.

Bill Ross, the head of Special Collections, says digitization has turned the library from a repository into a doorway to information. "To my mind, it's no longer important what you own, but what you provide access to," says Ross, who chairs the Digital Library Committee. "Because what you need is the information. Who cares who owns it?" If you can get an article from Document Delivery, if you can borrow a book from the Boston Library Consortium, he argues, referring to different ways to get information that is not physically at the library, it's no longer as important for the library to try to buy all the books and periodicals it might once have thought necessary.

Still, Morner does not see any end to storing books and papers. "I don't think we're going to have a bookless library," she says. For one thing, not everything in the library is available online. For another, there is not a consensus that digital is in every way superior to print. On a more pragmatic level, Morner eyes the morning hubbub of students and notes, "This place is mobbed and very, very popular." But the library is moving towards a time when current periodicals may not be in paper form, she says, as more and more are online.

As more of the library's own possessions are scanned and posted online, students need help finding things. "If you needed the address of a publisher 10 or 20 years ago, you might have called the reference desk," says Morner. "Now, you use Google. Questions tend to be fewer, but more complicated, and students often need help figuring them out."

While students can get more information faster, the downside is "it's hard to wade through all that and evaluate what you're looking at," Morner says. And she frets that often students are under the impression that if something is online, it's more valid than something published in a book. "They have to be taught to discriminate," she says, and UNH reference librarians offer students classes and individual tutoring sessions, and answer e-mails on how to hunt for information and how to judge what's good information and what's not. Today, library staffers spend more time helping students access online databases and e-journals than finding paper books, Morner says.

Roland Goodbody '82, manuscripts curator in Special Collections, says a big part of what he does is "helping kids find stuff." An example is the Clamshell Alliance Collection, he says, referring to documents on the group's epic 17-year battle—starting in the '70s—against the Seabrook nuclear power plant, a collection that could be headed for digitization. When he helps orient a class on grassroots organizations and the media, public opinion and mass communication, Goodbody has to remind himself that these students weren't born at the start of that fight.

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