The Research Process: Books & Beyond

Many of the assignments you receive as part of your experience in higher education will require you to use the library for research. To do this you must become familiar with its collections and services. You may be familiar with your high school or public library. You will find, however, that the college or university library is more complex and often larger than the library with which you may be familiar. It probably provides a greater variety of services, and it may use a different scheme for classifying its materials. Over the last two decades technology has drastically changed the way we think of libraries. For many, the traditional notion of libraries as storehouses for books has been replaced by the image of a virtuallibrary-that is, a library in which all the information is available electronically. In this image, if a building exists at all it is only to house computers and to provide a laboratory in which librarians, acting as information specialists, are engaged in creating information in digital format. Neither the traditional notion of a library as a storehouse for books nor the image of a virtual library is entirely true today. However, there is a certain amount of validity in each of these images. The library you are using probably no longer has a card catalog. In most academic libraries the card catalog has been replaced by an online catalog. Many libraries have canceled paper subscriptions to indexes and abstracts, replacing them with electronic versions. Although libraries have gotten rid of their card catalogs in favor of online catalogs and subscribe to online databases and other resources in electronic format, they continue to retain and purchase materials in traditional paper, microfiche, microfilm, video cassette, and the like. And while it is true that technology has improved the ways we retrieve information, it has also added levels of complexity. College and university libraries offer a variety of