Libraries and Google
“Here is your next assignment topic. Please write an essay of one thousand words about the Khoi San. When this race has originated, what language they speak, and everything else about them. Please remember to write the date and make sure that the year 1998 is written in the right-hand corner of your assignment,” Mrs. van Dyk instructs her Grade 7 class. Naomi has already started to plan her assignment in her head. She knows that the sooner she starts with this assignment, the quicker this is done.
Two days later and Naomi finds herself in her local library. She walks over to the big, brown filing cabinet with all the reference cards to all the books in the library. She needs to find the correct book that will assist her with her assignment. All the reference cards are alphabetical. Xhoi San starts with an “X”. Her fingers run through all the reference cards within the “X” category. After a minute or so, her eyes light up. “Xhoi San!” She pulls the card and on this, all the books with their reference numbers about the Xhoi San, are on this card. She takes the card with her and walks over to the corresponding bookshelves.
“XRS002125634SSI,” she whispers to herself. That’s the reference number of the corresponding book she needs to find on the bookshelf. Her right hand’s index finger is sliding over all the books. “XRS ….” she whispers again.
At last, after about a minute, she finds the corresponding book. She takes it off from the bookshelf. The book’s title is: “Xhoi San and their heritage. Written by Markus Labuschagne.” Naomi is relieved to have found the book. Sometimes people will take out the book for two weeks, which results in other people either making a booking for that book or trying to find an alternative book to assist them. Today was Naomi’s lucky day.
Naomi walks to the study room within the library. Here students come and make themselves comfortable to access the internet on the Pentium 2 computer with a 350mHz CPU clock rate. It only takes a minute to dial up to the internet and, then you can browse the internet for information. But this comes at an additional cost which is more than the copies of a book.
Naomi makes herself comfortable at one of the desks and pages through the book. She uses small pieces of torn paper, for markers to remember which pages she wants to make copies of. Quietly she gets up from the desk and walks over to the copier machine. It’s about 10 pages of copies she’s making. After that, she walks over to the librarian and pays the 50c per page for the copies she made. Naomi is very happy because now she can go home and finish her assignment, in the comfort of her own home.
At home, Naomi read through the copies she made with information about the Xhoi San. Shen then summed it up by writing all the information on an A5 paper. It took a while to write all the information with a blue pen onto the A5 paper but she got it done in 3 hours. After that, she scanned through the copies she made at the library for the pictures that needed to be included in her assignment. She then took a scissor, cut out the photos in her copies, and used glue to paste them onto the A5 paper. Done and dusted after 4 hours.
Fast forward to 2021.
“Mom! Our teacher Mr. Harris wants us to do an assignment about racism,” Peter tells his mom as soon as he gets into the car.
“Okay, so when you get home after you have eaten, you switch on your tablet and Google.”
“Yes, mom,” Peter signs. He has hoped that his mom would help him by finding all the information on Google for him. He’s so not in the mood to do it himself. He wants to start up his Xbox and play Elder Scrolls instead.
It’s 15h00 and Peter switches on his tablet. He opens the browser and Google is his homepage. By tapping on the screen of his tablet with his index finger, he types the word “racism.” He then taps on the magnifying glass icon on the right-hand side of the search bar. It’s not even a second and the new page of Google with all the search results pop open on the tablet’s screen. There are thousands of websites with information regarding racism. Wikipedia is the first website in the search results. He holds his index finger on the first website link and a small prompt opens up, asking what he wants to do? Either “copy link location” or “open link in new tab.” Peter selects the latter.
As Peter continues to pull up websites with the information he needs, he pastes the information into a Microsoft Word document. After finishing this, he now needs to read through the material and sum it up in his own words along with citing. Citing indicates where he got his information from, to prevent plagiarism. After he has done this, his assignment just needed some photos to make it more colorful and engaging. He sought through the websites, then copy and paste the photos into the Word document. Then he connected the tablet wireless to the printer and printed his assignment. Done and dusted after 2 hours.
When last have you visited a library or seen you from inside?
Have you ever visited a library?
