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16 Legal Reference Services Q. 1 (1997-1998)

handle is hein.journals/lgrefsq16 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL

Recently, Professor Leon Litwack, Chair of the University of
California, Berkeley Academic Senate Library Committee, spoke
with some of the librarians at Berkeley. Professor Litwack is one of
our most distinguished faculty members. As a historian, he cares
deeply about preserving and passing on information, and about
teaching people to do insightful research. As a faculty member who
is enormously committed to undergraduate education, he has major
concerns about the so-called library of the future. He is especially
worried about the loss of browsing in the library and he raised some
crucial questions about what the neglect of the libraries is going to
mean for education. He discussed the fact that his own interest in
history and ideas had been stimulated by browsing through libraries
when he was a student. If students can't browse the books in a
particular subject area, how are they going to get a sense of the
subject and what kind of research are they going to do? Will they
understand the depth and breadth of their subjects? Will they see
ideas in context? These are incredibly important questions. Librari-
ans have seen that using a computer to do research can create a kind
of 'target' mentality in which the searcher spends hours trying to
home in on a particular item, rather than to search for information in
a context, They browse with great enthusiasm, but also with little
Legal Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 16(l) 1997
@ 1997 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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