Katarina Maxianova, who received her bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in May, took a seminar last year in which the professor assigned two articles from New Left Review magazine. She found one immediately through Google; for the other, she had to trek to the library stacks. "Everyone in class tried to get those articles online," she said, "and some people didn't even bother to go to the stacks when they couldn't Google them." For the last few years, librarians have increasingly seen people use online search sites not to supplement research libraries but to replace them. Yet only recently have librarians stopped lamenting the trend and started working to close the gap between traditional scholarly research and the incomplete, often random results of a Google search.
|