Students of the past used to spent countless hours in the library reading up, regardless of whether it was for a project, for leisure, or simply for supplementing their knowledge. It would be hard to imagine modern day students seating in libraries, patiently, researching, because in present times, the cyberspace serves as a platform that allows everyone accessibility to online research materials. To put it simply, one of the greatest online portal for research is "Google.com".
The author is quite right in saying that Google has indeed revolutionised and that it itself is now a verb that is widely used and accepted. How we can see for ourselves the success of Google include the fact that Google has been the website with the most traffic flow for quite some time now in the USA. Google does have the potential of taking over as the world’s library, being connected to millions and millions of sites which provide tons of information.
But Google has its problems. As with the internet, there is a veil of anonymity which the online user can hide himself or herself such that no responsibility will be taken should something go wrong. Therefore, as much as Google can link all these sites to us, it cannot ensure, nor can McAfee screening, that the information provided is correct and will help in our research. Therefore, researchers that use Google have to discern for themselves which of the sources are authentic and can be trusted, which therefore takes more time. Furthermore, there is the problem of contradicting sources that can happen, particularly when one site contradicts another, and we do not know which one to trust.
Therefore, just a Googlary alone may not be enough to fulfil the requirements that people all around the world need for research. For example, the internet will never be smart enough to provide the most adequate help in researching and finding sources, while when we go to proper libraries, there is always a helpful librarian to help us on our projects and stuff, and to guide us to the correct books that will help us in the research. Also, we can agree that those books in libraries can generally be trusted more than the sources online, as they go through editing and publishing.
I would recommend that while resources be made available online for those who want to access them, that the libraries should still be our main source of information when it comes to proper research that we want to be credible as future references. By doing this, we can prevent several important issues such as plagiarism and things like copyright and permission issues. Therefore, while online resources are definitely much easier to access, there are pros of using a library for research that a Googlary might not be able to give us.
While a Googlary sounds like a nice idea, it would be better for us to follow the traditional guide of using a library for our research.
