Libraries and Their Importance in an Academic Environment.
Libraries are powerful tools for those that are familiar with them, can use them to .
their full potential, and most importantly- are not afraid of them. A library can help a senior citizen deepen his knowledge about that World War II battle he was curious about, as well as a Political Science major acquire an "A" on that all important final paper. Despite the fact that today's libraries are a little more complicated than 10 years ago- they still serve the same purpose.
Taking up on that notion of purpose that libraries serve, we can say that a library is like a bottomless well. All and any kind of information one needs can be found in a library. Old-fashioned card catalogs are swept for a series of zeros and ones registered on a hard disk of a computer. A computer catalog does yield faster results, but not always better. Sometimes looking through a computer catalog can seem like a quest rather than a simple search. The disappearance of the card catalog can be a tough task for some to get accustomed to, but the new way of searching, overall, is a nice touch. But let's not get interrupted here. Libraries have been around for ages, and even the ancient civilizations knew their importance. ""During the early periods of human civilization, the ancient Egyptian temples must have contained the first organized library collections. Libraries are reported to have existed for 6000 years in Egypt. There were private collections of books, and there were small deposits associated with schools, royal palaces, and temples as these at Heliopolis, Dendarah, and Edfu, the latter known as the House of Papyrus."" Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Volume VII, page 574. Library is not a new invention as we see. But there are a lot of new inventions working for us inside the library; like the computer catalog already mentioned here.
