Why Libraries & Librarians are Extremely Important

Every Thursday for a few weeks I will remind you of why libraries and librarians are extremely important. Here is reason number one.

Not everything is available on the Internet. The amazing amount of useful information on the Internet has some people thinking that everything can be found online for free. Not so! Despite Google's digitizing efforts, contemporary authors and publishers will not allow their work to be freely accessible over the Internet. Copyright law already prohibits making copyrighted books fully accessible through Google, only small selections. It will be a long time before the New York Times bestsellers will be free online. Current copyright protects works for 70 years beyond the death of the author. Even some works in the public domain are off limits. If an out of copyright includes prefaces, introductions, or appendices that are still in copyright, the whole work falls under copyrighted status. And it took a librarian to tell you this.
Source: The idea and some information comes fromWill Sherman in Information Outlook v11 n06