Genealogy Wise

The Genealogy & Family History Social Network

Having spent a goodly portion of my life in libraries, both as a patron and a library employee, I am aware that there are a lot of things about seeing books on shelves and having them to read that are lost when the books are digitized. The greatest loss is the synergy of having books grouped together. No catalog or index can give you the perspective of reading the shelves, that is, looking at each book in turn about a particular subject. Whatever the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System of cataloging books, the system did put the books into subject groupings that lead me to find interesting items I may otherwise have missed. While at the University, I used to spend my lunch hour walking up and down the shelves looking for anything interesting. No matter how good Google or other search engines become, that experience, of seeing the actual books and randomly looking at their content, is lost in the digital world.
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