Since my long-ago days as an undergraduate, computers have changed many things about campus life. Students receive assignments and turn in their work over the Web. They chat with one another and with instructors in online class discussion groups. The "textbook" is likely to be a collection of chapters from various sources, chosen by the professor and custom-printed at the school bookstore or at a local Kinko's. But one thing has remained largely the same: Researching a paper still requires lots of hours in the library. The catalog is in a computer, not on cards, and notes may be taken on a laptop, but the process has hardly changed for generations.
Libraries are essential because only a tiny fraction of the knowledge contained in books is available on the Web--and what's there is hard to find or use. Things should change as more and more books are put into electronic form and as publishers and distributors figure out how to make money in the process.
Questia Media America (www.questia.com), a Houston startup, is at the forefront of creating an online library geared to college students. For a subscription fee of $19.95 a month, students gain access to nearly 70,000 books in the social sciences and humanities. They can search text, take notes within Questia's Java-based application, and store them as part of a "project" on a Web server. Students can copy text from an online book, and when they paste it into a word processor, it generates a citation or footnote in one of several standard styles, such as American Psychological Assn. or Modern Language Assn. At the end of the project, all of the references can be gathered together and pasted into a document as a bibliography. While it seems extravagant for Questia to claim that a student can save 7 to 10 hours of work on a 10-page paper, I can see how it would be a big help.
But there are some problems. First, for all practical purposes, Questia users can only read books or journal articles on-screen. They can print the text, but only one page at a time, and the printout looks like a Web page, not a page from a book. (Publishers will not allow unlimited printing.) Most students who want to read sections of books, not just extract quotes, are going to want a hard copy of the actual book or journal.
A second weakness is the scope of the on-line library. While 70,000 items sounds like a lot, it is barely half of the new works acquired each year by the libraries of my old stomping grounds, the University of Michigan. Questia does not include the physical sciences or mathematics, and even where it specializes, coverage can be spotty. For example, a search in sociology for "Emile Durkheim" turned up The Division of Labor in Society, though Durkheim was listed as the translator rather than as author. Questia is missing his classic Suicide, a work found in any middling undergraduate library. "Students in the first or second year writing on a subject we support well could use Questia exclusively," says Questia CEO Troy Williams. "Upper-division and graduate students will need physical resources as well."
Ebrary, a Mountain View (Calif.) startup (partly owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies, parent of BusinessWeek) takes a different approach to the business. Rather than selling subscriptions, it makes electronic books available on a pay-per-use basis. You deposit money in an ebrary account, then pay a quarter to copy a quotation or 25 cents per page to print as much of the work as you want. One big advantage over Questia: Ebrary text is presented in Adobe Acrobat, so printing gives you a reasonable facsimile of the original. You can see a demonstration of ebrary at learningnetwork.ebrary.com, but with only 1,500 titles online, it's hard to tell how useful the service will ultimately be when many thousands of titles are available.
Even in their primitive state, it's easy to see how online libraries could take a lot of the tedium out of research. I don't think they will ever replace the pleasures of browsing the stacks of a serious research collection. As a lover of old-fashioned libraries, I certainly hope not. But as a tool to simplify the chore of much student research, the online library's day is coming.
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Copyright 2001, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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