AP Reports Encyclopedia Use Is Down
The Associated Press circulated a wire story today claiming fewer people are using encyclopedias, favoring sources like the Internet instead. Fewer people are even using encyclopedias on CD-ROM. (Seems like I already had this conversation. And yes, there was interaction with other bloggers, so it was a conversation.)
” … With so much free online information, including proprietary databases for which libraries pay for the public’s use, families like Amy Sahn’s say encyclopedias seem unnecessary. …
… ‘The kids are so computer literate,’ Sahn said, ‘that it would seem almost foreign to them to use a book.’”
I could go off on a tangent about the author referring to librarians as “the fastest human search engines in the pre-Internet era,” but that would be too off-topic for this post.
