Reading, Writing, Research

As long as there have been public libraries, librarians have been involved in education. They have helped people choose what to read for leisure and helped with their information needs. The recent emphasis on information literacy is more of a new term than a new concept, but as technology has transformed everything in society, information literacy needs to be done differently. For most of the twentieth century, the best way for most people to identify books on a particular subject was the card catalog in the library. Specialists could use various published bibliographies or the Cumulative Book Index among other tools. Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which began publication in 1905, helped the general public find information in magazines, etc. As the century progressed, publishers brought out more, and more specialized, indexes to periodical literature, including some of the major newspapers. Encyclopedias have been around since the late eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, encyclopedia publishers aggressively marketed door to door. Many families owned a set, but the library always had up-to-date editions of several different encyclopedias. The foregoing describes the kinds of tools available up until the Internet went public. In every case (except for the family encyclopedia), people … Continue reading →