I remember a lot of teachers in high school expressing frustration that the ease of internet searching made their students far less willing to find physical books to use as sources. What’s funny to me is that my favorite research strategy in college is one that uses search engines to find physical books in a way that card catalogs and Library of Congress subject headings NEVER can!
Two magic words: Google Books.
The capability to search inside millions of books allows you to find highly specialized, detailed references to topics which would never come up in a standard search of a collection.
Google books gets a bad rap because they don’t provide complete copies of all books–pages are often omitted, making them a poor choice for students who think they can get textbooks for free rather than buying print copies. I would agree that trying to squint at a truncated copy of a lit text is not the best use of this technology. What amazes me is how often I can find a text through Google Books that gives me a hit for my topic–whether that topic is cyborgs or Renaissance reliquaries–and how often those hits are books that my college library already owns. I can find the relevant pages and citations without having to scan, without checking the index–and then do the reading in the physical book itself.
Who says the internet has to drive us away from books?
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+1 for Google Books. Also for Google Scholar—the “Find it at Swarthmore” button is the best thing ever.