Nowadays research is totally different from the past. Everything changes according to the time. Before we used to utilize books as the main source of information and we were satisfied with the answers. Right now everything goes around computers and the internet. Now you do not have to take hours reading book to find a simple answer, you can just read the abstract of a particular article and Journal and you will know what it is taking about. Having the opportunity of reading the article “Future Reading” from the New Yorker by Anthony Grafton, gave me a new perspective about research and the internet used. Also it talks about how books will not longer exist in the regular format. These means everything will be computerized for a better used.
In the past having books that were available for people were a great advance, because people can have the access to other countries and lands. Books were the teachers of many people were they learn about stories in other places. We can find that in the past in a place called Mesopotamian books were important fro people. “The greatest and most famous of the Ancient Collections, The library of Alexandria, had, in its ambitions and its methods, a good deal in common with Google’s Book Project…” The library means a lot to the people in that time because it was a source of knowledge. In the other hand if we make a comparator between the past a now we kind find something in common. Such as books were make it to learn and to be read it, like today we also read the book, not the regular format of a book, but throughout the internet. Being available to choose what part we want to read or the one that shows more interest to us.
Also we can find in this article how Google and Microsoft are making the race to become the more credible source of information. They are trying to convert the books from the past in encyclopedia of knowledge, were you go a look for the information you want and get a lot of answers with different meaning. “Google’s Projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it…” Every time that you go to any of this websites you will get the most current information that was get from books and scanning to be available for us.
As well in this article we can see that Google and Microsoft have some difficulties putting the books into the website because of many controversies. One of the issues that this websites have was the copyright. ”Google, controversially, is scanning these books although it is not yet making them available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what it knows it can be legitimately disseminate.” I feel that this statement take us to the conclusion that not all the website are credible and constant. Furthermore these companies do it because of the interest of getting money and profit. In the other hand because Google and Microsoft are scanning books that does not mean that we will get information from books in the past.
Finally now on if you want to do research you really have to know the way of handle the internet. You will have to know how to navigate and get the more trusted information. In addition you also have to take in consideration that not everything that you looking for you will find it in the internet, maybe you will have to do it in the old way. Take a book, look for the index and start answering your questions. That’s why we still have libraries available.
