What’s the Point of Libraries Anyways?

On my classes famous trip to our library archives on campus, I began to think about what purpose libraries will serve in the future.

Everything is becoming digitized. You can find just about any book or article or fact or resource online. A google search is all you need most of the time.

Are the days of flipping through book after book to find material that might relate to your topic gone?

Is everything bound to be scanned and exposed on the web for all to see?

Will future generations not spend rainy summer afternoons immersed inside the stacks of the library?

I think not.

Books are lovely.

I’m a old school reader when it comes to books. I go to bookstores and read books front to back while the rest of my family looks for their books. I love the feel of a book in my hand and I love the thrill of physically turning page after page the story develops. I never invested in an e-reader, and when I’m forced to read articles on my computer, I find it to be tasking on my eyes.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think I’m completely alone in this. There’s no way books will completely go out of the vogue. Not only because there are plenty of traditional book lovers still out there like myself, but because print research and online research are quite different things.

Print research is its own beast.

This is something I’ve recently noticed. I never really paid much attention to the fact that print research involves hands on digging and a completely different mindset than online research.

Generally, in online research, the process consists of a narrow search that ends up with extremely broad results. Millions of results show up in less than a second when using the Google search bar.

In print research, the process is the opposite and it tends to consist of a broad search that yields specific results. Print research is much more of an adventure because you never really can know what you’re going to find. Online research allows for selectivity and the top result will usually correlate very strongly with what you’re searching.

When you search for something in a book you might find something entirely different and that’s part of what makes print research so interesting and valuable.

Libraries are free.

The other great thing about libraries is that they are free! Free things are always good as my brother says, and in this case, I couldn’t agree more. Libraries allow anyone to have access to wealths of knowledge. I believe that this increases the intelligence of our nation.

Also most libraries have computers! Which means that anyone who doesn’t have access to wifi or a computer at home can go to the library for no cost at all. With libraries there is no excuse for students to not have accessibility to any book or website that can help them in their studying.

I can’t say for certain if Libraries will be around in ten or fifteen years, but I do know that if they are replaced or removed from our country, it will be a great loss.

Response

After writing this blog post one of my classmates Jack Bedard (you can find the post here) commented on the post and wrote his own blog stating that libraries are outdated and not important due to everything being online.

I disagree wholly and even though research is becoming more and more technology based, print research is a different type of research than internet research. So I’m sorry Jack I have to disagree

P.S. just another quick side note he most likely wrote the blog post in the library.