The Internet is a Library

Well, in fact, it's several libraries—all over the world.

Among the earliest and most avid users of the Internet were colleges and universities. Many have their whole computer network tied into the Internet—including the computerized card catalog for the university library.

These schools use the Internet to operate interlibrary loan programs. When a student or professor requests a book that's not in the stacks, the library can locate the book at a branch campus, another university, or even at a public library or private research collection, and can have it sent from there. Of course, the university pays for that privilege by making its own collection available to all the other libraries it borrows from.

All this interlibrary networking leaves many public, private, government, and academic catalogs accessible to any Internet user. Curious readers can plumb the collections of the great universities to find exactly the material they're looking for. The choices include public and private libraries, and specialized libraries for medicine, law, and other subject areas.

There are thousands of libraries on the Internet, including many public libraries. Here's a sampling:

The U.S. Library of Congress

The Environmental Protection Agency Library

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration Library

The Law Library at Columbia University

Yale University

Harvard University

University of Massachusetts

University of Minnesota

Dartmouth College

Cleveland Public Library System

Detroit Public Library System

New York Public Library System

Seattle Public Library System

Now, of course, whether or not an Internet user can actually borrow anything is another story. Different libraries enforce different policies about who can borrow and who can't. Some libraries do allow people to order a title right over the Internet, to be delivered by mail. For those that don't, Internet users can usually go to their own local university or public library and ask a librarian to make the request. (Libraries are pretty friendly about loaning to other libraries; they stick together that way.)

No matter how they finally get their hands on the book, the value of the Internet is that it lets users find the book—almost no matter where it's stacked. To help, there are bibliographic indexing services on the Internet that list where materials on certain subjects can be found.

In the information age, there is, however, another kind of library. The text of reports, papers, and even whole books can be (and usually is) stored in computer files. Here is where the library resources on the Internet shine. There are literally millions of files of information out on the Internet that savvy users can locate and then copy—right over the Internet—from the distant computer to their own, where they can read the information on their computer screens or print it on a printer.

Next to e-mail, this may be the most often used and most valuable resource on the Internet. It allows researchers (or the merely curious) to acquire the latest and most detailed information about every topic imaginable. In fact, much of the information available this way may not be published in any book—the Internet offers people access to information that's unavailable to them in any other way.

So Now You Know. . .