It Network

In the traditional book-centric system where we suppose to look through the card catalog, it was time consuming and was not reliable. Many times, it takes hours for me to research on a subject and ended up with information that I don’t need. I remember in all research projects that I worked on in the past, it takes more time to look for the references than for me to read through the articles. Subject search for the old card catalog system was almost impossible and to search for all related articles, it will take a team of students to finish on that project.

With the luxury of online tools and the Internet enabled library, it has many peoples’ library experiences changed. First, the speed of research had improved tremendously. From physically going to the library card catalog to look for information online, we had cut down our driving time and shorten our research time in more than half. Online libraries and researches through Yahoo and Google are like having a card catalog in front of the computer. It shows all related information when we type at the search options under the browsers and when we use the online library from many universities, it let us search through topics by keywords, titles, authors, subject headings and ISBN numbers. After we find the right copy, we can reserve the copy online and pick that up at the physical location of the library. As for the Dewey Decimal Classification DDC, it is made up of ten main classes or categories, each divided into ten secondary classes or subcategories, each having ten subdivisions. It will get extremely complex as information grows within itself as well as trying to look for any information. It might be a good system when information is limited and importance of specific quote is not needed. Card Catalog system is a good design and somewhat holds the same structure as the dictionary we use, but the physical time on looking for information and the lack of updates are the two most severe draw back on it. While...