[battlegearboat]

Googleing Madam Marion...

[buffyt]

My daughter is a senior at UT majoring in Hydrogeology. I just sent her a copy of that article. I guess it is a good idea, so long as they have back up copies in case of computer crash - Murhphy's Law.

[listenhillary]

So why have libraries at all? Why have librarians?

[CDHart]

I used to buy newspapers and news magazines and get tons of books from the library. Now I go online for information. The library is going to go the way of the stagecoach. However, I do hope they keep the hard copies somewhere safe.

Carolyn

[Seruzawa]

Sometimes nothing beats sitting back and reading a book. Books don't require a power source and a fragile electronic display. 50 years from now a book is still readable while Ebooks are guaranteed to be unreadable on "New Improved Windows ZZYZZYX". Unless you buy the upgrade. Books don't disappear if a bearing goes in a hard drive. Sometimes you need several books open at once for cross-referencing... try that with a computer.

Ebooks are nowhere near replacing real books as far as I'm concerned. But the real reason is that I've got an entire room of my house full of books and if I replace them with Ebooks then my wife will make me do something with the room.

[Victoria_R]

"There's a real transition going on," said Sarah Thomas, past president of the Association of Research Libraries and the librarian at the Cornell University Library in Ithaca, N.Y. "This is not to say you don't have paper or books. Of course, they're sacred. But more and more we're delivering material to the user as opposed to the user coming into the library to get it."

You know what's really cool about a book printed on decent paper and kept in a decent library?

Somebody can still wander down to the library and pick it up after a hundred years without having to upgrade the software, finding some ancient piece of machinery to decipher it, paying the copyright cops a fee, or wondering if someone has surreptitiously edited it to make it "political correct".

[Noachian]

So, how do you electronically dog ear a page, highlight a phrase with a yellow marker, make notes in the margins, or stack them on shelves with multiple pieces of paper sticking out as bookmarks?

[Smokin' Joe]

WInston Smith (1984) would have loved this!

No more messy cut-and-paste.

Just a few taps of the keyboard and enemies of the state are flushed down the cybernetic memory hole.

No more eeevil ancient tomes decrying the latest revision of history.

The ancients were right--carve it in stone.

I'll take a hard copy every time.

[Montfort]

This is disturbing because it is part of a trend toward more computerized research , with too much emphasis web-based sources. The problem with this is that many of the more solid sources are not yet available on the web, and students rely heavily on the web. They now cite web pages in term papers.

I used to love to find where a particular topic was covered, and go to that area in the stacks and see what books were there. You could do the nearly the same thing with a card catalog and a closed-stacks system, but it was more tedious.

Now the students may not even see many of the books, but could end up citing web-based stuff like UN reports and other publications put out by activist groups and governments. These are part of the story, but some scholarly books and articles should be part of the research.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

I am currently sitting in the world's largest research library...in front of my own computer...with Google.

[Logophile]

Rarely do today's students hunt for a book in the stacks, she said. Now they go online and may end up with a book, but also a DVD or other medium. But, she said, "it's unlikely there will be libraries without books for a long time."

Many students refuse to hunt for books in the stack. If they cannot find what they want using Google for ten minutes, they give up.

One of my colleagues assigned her students a research paper this semester. She specified that they cite their references, and that at least two of those references should be to books from the library. Most of the students did not bother.

While it is true that the Internet is a wonderful resource -- I depend on it heavily in my work -- not everything of interest is online. Moreover, there is a lot of worthless junk on the Internet, and students tend to be too trusting of what they find there.