Stanford Creates Bookless Library

"With books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily," Josephine told NPR.

Five years ago the library housed 80,000 engineering books and was quickly running out of space. Since then, the librarians have decreased that number by 85 percent, down to only 10,000 books. Librarians decided which books to keep by looking at how frequently they were checked out. Most of them hadn't been checked out in five years.

That in turn has created quite an interesting phenomenon: a library with no books on many shelves.

Of course, it also makes sense to put the most used books in digital format, too. Stanford library director Michael Keller expects that soon all the books will be digitized.

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