Sunday, February 25, 2007

The Use of Online Annotated Bibliographies

The technology era has brought about many new resources for searching on the internet. The vast amount of information on the web can easily be found with the proper resources. We have all learned to use libraries, but the ease, functionality, and vast amount of knowledge that the internet provides is quickly making libraries obsolete. In the past couple of years, if not even months, new sites have become available that allow people to store the information that they read online and file the information easily. These sites allow for users to view their collection of websites virtually anywhere around the world. The site such as Diigo allows a researcher to write on the website document and save these sticky notes for later use. So, in comparison to library research, this site allows a visitor to mark up a web page and aid their reading, later providing key points they may need, which was once a major advantage for print sources. The use of this site is easy and is continuing to be developed for more sophisticated uses. The internet and online annotation programs make it much simpler for users to search a vast array of documents and academically read through them. In addition, traditional library techniques are losing their advantages since there has been much success in transcribing text to online sites, so the academic knowledge that once was only prominent in real world libraries can now be found at the click of a button from a person's personal computer. Needlessly to say, the value of books is still relevant, but in a decade or so the tools and information available to everyone wirelessly will supersede the functions of traditional library researching. Lastly, the tools that are surfacing across the internet are only valuable to the users that know they exist. So, I strongly recommend that anybody who uses the internet regularly to visit such sites as Diigo, Zotero, and del.icio.us.

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