Realizing the Virtual Library
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Description
I hardly ever go to a library. But the libraries at Harvard University are among the major resources for my work as a teacher and researcher. I access them sitting at home or in the office, connected by modem, at all hours of the day or night. I can use them the way I do for a simple reason: the HOLLIS databases contain most of the books I use, organized in ways that make it possible for me to and them. The real books can be delivered to me and returned by my research assistants: what I need, when I am deciding what to read, is the virtual trace of the book in the database. If the system also made available online the Philosopher’s Index and the MLA bibliographies, I could do almost all the journal searches I wanted, too: and if I could take the articles off the system (with a reasonable copyright charge), I would. I am delighted that the library makes possible what it does, in as transparent a way as possible for this user and look forward to more of the same: using even more of the resources of Widener Library while hardly ever going there. One thing more I would like to see is online access to journal articles—not abstracts alone, but the articles themselves. This would add enormously to the utility of the library as a support for my research: I could read more of them, browse more (and not randomly as I now do on paper but using searches for key words), and could quickly follow up references. The difference in the quantity of time spent on research would make possible a qualitative difference in the kind of work I could do. It used to be a serious scholarly project to collect all the recent literature on a subject. To do it one needed the help of expert reference librarians or a great knowledge of the field. Now, with the bibliographic resources available and the fact that they are stored in machine-readable and thus searchable formats, the work of months or years can be done in a few hours. It is not just that time is saved in locating the material: because texts can be searched online, I can actually handle the text in ways that were never before possible. I can ask questions—about the way in which an author uses language, for example—that I simply wouldn’t have bothered to ask using traditional research methods.
Source Publication
Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic Libraries in Teaching, Learning, and Research
Source Editors/Authors
Lawrence Dowler
Publication Date
1997
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "Realizing the Virtual Library" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 164.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/164
