Non-Book Materials, Libraries and Librarians

Abstract

Writing of one kind or another has been with us about 7,000 to 10,000 years; pictures, cave paintings, etc., as much as 50, 000 years. It has been only 35 years since educational motion pictures became a physical reality in the classroom; we have had cheap film, slides, etc. , only for the past 20 years. We have been using print in one or another form for only 500 years, and it too is now appearing in vastly changed and machinery- dependent forms. We are talking here about non-book materials: visual aids and aural aids, and the combination aural /visual such as motion pictures and television. A sine qua non of this definition, but not always so stated, is that all types of materials are necessary to us in our libraries as aids and supplements to the experiences stirred up and made alive by book materials. Therefore, in talking about non-book materials in libraries, I shall treat them as if they were as common to us as books, since I see no reason for their inclusion as part of our working tools if they are not considered as basic and vital for their particular purposes as are books for the things books can do. Let me pretend that for the next three or so paragraphs I am talking to an audio/visual class, and that I am presenting to them a part of the story as to why it is important to consider audio/visual materials in the learning process.published or submitted for publicatio