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Why Libraries
LIBRARIES AND TECHNOLOGY
- Television didn’t spell the end of movie theaters, personal sound systems didn’t spell the
end of radio, and the Internet won’t spell the end of libraries
- The library of tomorrow will be a hybrid of print (analog) and digital
- Book production vastly outpaces digitization
- More than 68,000 books are published in the U.S. alone each year
- Only about 1,300 books have been digitized by Project Gutenberg
- Other print materials will not wind up on the Internet
- The cost of digitizing existing books/information is prohibitive
- Storage requirements are prohibitive (48 gigabytes per New Yorker)
- Very little is actually on the Internet
- One-half of one percent of the 110 million Library of Congress items
- Only about 8 percent of all journals
- Very little that is more than 15 years old is on the Internet
- Very little of what’s on the Internet is worthwhile
- There is no quality control for information and isn’t likely to be any
- There is no way to separate out-of-date from current information
- Without libraries, the Internet is less useful
- More people learn how to use the Internet at libraries than elsewhere
- For those without access at work, school or home, libraries are the primary place to
access the Internet
- You can’t search everything on the Internet regardless of your search strategy
- Search engines access limited amounts of Internet information
- 30 percent is indexed by search engines; the rest is difficult to access
- People simply do not read on their computers
- 80 percent of those who actually do buy electronic books say they buy paper books and
do not read books on computers
- What happens when the power goes out?
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