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Permalink Reply by Siddhartha Shankar Ray on June 7, 2014 at 6:31

Dear Sri Ganesh,

Many Thanks for highlighting the issue which explains the supremacy of Libraries over the web based materials. The issue is well understood by many but they often speak the opposite. Especially during interviews for recruitment of Librarians.It is a very common tendency of a section of the recruiters to put pressure upon the candidates. But the practical thing is when the researchers are mostly engaged to the NET and rely upon the common Search Engines than reading aids, they often get shifted from serious research.

Just take an example. Try searching literature on Cholecystectomy.

The Google will present more than 6.5 LAKHS of references.

Now search Medline or Pubmed site, you will get around 14.6 THOUSAND references and these 14.6 K articles are professional technical articles published in research journals! So one can easily assess the relevance of an abstracting database over common search engines. No doubt the references are quite useful  for writing features and popular articles, but when you mean serious business, like academic or research activities, such search engines often delivers many more materials which are not so relevant. You just imagine how tiring and time consuming will it be if you have to select relevant articles out of 6.5 Lakhs references!!

I think this justifies the impact & importance of Libraries and academic reading aids.

Thank you once again, for your post.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta

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Permalink Reply by Sridevi sindagi on June 8, 2014 at 4:57

Its 100 n 10 percent correct tanx for d wonderful post.. librarians actually ROCKS

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Permalink Reply by Siddu on July 31, 2014 at 17:45

Apples should be compared with Apples only and not with Oranges or Watermelons or with any other fruit for that matter.  Both Librarians and Google have their own, important roles to play.  The roles can at times be complementary in nature but should never play supplementary role to one another.

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