Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
Wandering the stacks at the library has a certain romantic feel to it. But is it practical? The digitizing of books, newspapers, and journals has effectively removed the walls between centuries of content and end users. If, for example, you want to write an informative speech on the history of your hometown, you could quickly enter the name of your town into any number of digital archives and access a wealth of news articles and literary references to it in major newspapers dating back several centuries (The New York Times digital archive, for example, goes back to 1851). You might find stunning photos of your town from the Associated Press or Corbis photo archives (you can search them for free). The Library of Congress Archive has an ever-growing online collection, where you might find photos, posters, letters, and artifacts. And you will be able to search through more books than any brick-and-mortar library could possibly hold, thanks to a somewhat controversial project started by Google.
The Google Books Library Project, which aims to “make it easier for people to find relevant books—specifically, books they would not find any other way such as those that are out of print,” offers searchable digital scans of millions of books through partnerships with major public and university libraries around the world (https://www. google.com/googlebooks/library/). For books in copyright, Google will provide links to sources you can purchase them from as well as libraries from which you can borrow. Books no longer in copyright (most books more than ninety years old are in the public domain) can be viewed in full; you even can download a pdf of the entire book. So if a writer stumbled through your town on the way to the California gold rush in 1849 and wrote about it in a novel, a poem, or work of nonfiction, you can find out what he or she thought about it.
Google Books remains somewhat controversial: a class-action lawsuit on behalf of copyright holders was filed. However, a judge sided with Google and argued that the book search does not infringe copyright (The New York Times, 2013). But for researchers—or anyone who is just a little intellectually curious, really—there is no denying that the ability to access primary sources quickly, from anywhere, and often for free, opens new doors of discovery and allows even the most casual web surfer to stumble onto texts that were out of reach, or perhaps just languishing unnoticed on library shelves, for decades.