Are university libraries becoming bookless?

Academic journals have made a dramatic transition away from print, relying on electronic releases and online publishers to market their material. There has been a greater push from governments to provide this academic research for free, Reuters has reported. Free access is widely encouraged because the internet has such enormous potential as a collaborative tool. As we've seen over the years, the digital movement appears to know no bounds.

Since the digitization of journals, many universities have expressed interest in the technology. Stanford made the announcement in 2010 that they were becoming involved in the bookless trend by utilizing a document conversion service and digitizing a large portion of their Physics and Engineering Library.

Such news wasn't that shocking, especially when one takes into account the fact that Stanford buys 273 books a day, according to San Jose's Mercury News. The digital conversion of books allows students from any campus to access the information and alleviates the growing storage problem universities across the United States are facing. Thanks to document imaging, the need for a university to house the largest amount of journals, books and data is no longer correlated to how physically large their libraries are.