Mar
21
Written by:
Dan Maas
3/21/2008
I keep a Google reader gadget on my iGoogle homepage and one of my feeds is from the Colorado Association of Libraries. They just posted a comment by an anonymous blogger who stated that "the bookshelf is the information source of last resort..."
What a sound byte! This anonymous post at the Colorado Association of School Libraries sure does hit you square in the face if you earned your high school diploma prior to the millenium. Please understand that I was co-chair of a Colorado Library Association project-of-the-year in 2001 when we automated 47 school and public libraries in Southern Colorado. So my first reaction was negative... but when I spent some time thinking about it (I left a comment over there) I had to agree at least in part because during my doctorate work at UNC in Greeley, I've yet to set foot in the Michener Library. I use the library databases all the time and I of course Google like crazy... but when I thought about a book... or more precisely a textbook... I realized that the way I find tidbits of information to cobble together into my own thinking no longer fits well with a book. It's just clumsy when you think about it. When was the last time you googled your textbook? Maybe the better question is when will we finally be able to google our textbooks?
That said, I don't think I agree that books are obsolete. While information gathering from books is clumsy, reading books is not. My son and I love to read books together like Harry Potter, the Golden Compass and even the Aeneid (he chose that one [;-). So I wouldn't agree that the book is the reading source of last resort, I guess I can see the blogger's point about information having left the page and is now found on the screen. The status of books is changing and us with them.
2 comment(s) so far...
Re: The information source of last resort
Hmm, I thought the UNC library was the Michener Library. I believe he wrote a book or two . . . :-)
By Karl Fisch on
4/1/2008
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Re: The information source of last resort
Sheesh... that's what I get for posting early in the morning. He's an alumnus of UNC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Michener
By DMaas on
4/2/2008
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