Page 13 - New eMagazine Assignment

Technology Affords Better Access to Resources

Blog 1

Thirty years ago when I was first a student at Louisville Technical Institute, now Sullivan

College of Technology and design, technology was just on the cusp of exploding. Although

every student had access to computers and most every room had several, at that time, state of the

art computers. It was a technical school after all. And although we had access to the state of the

art computers, the library was still the primary source for research. And no, not because the

library had internet or better computers, but because that was where the journals and articles and

newspapers were. We still had to look up articles in the card catalogue and hope that that

particular article was still available. We also had to read the article at the library. We weren’t

able to print them out or allowed to. So there was a lot of hours spent at the school library

looking up information and then reading, studying and making notes. That was thirty years ago.

Flash forward 15 years ago and the technology has gotten better. At least most colleges

had high speed internet, but most homes were still using dial up internet. I used AOL, Netzero

and Juno dialup internet and it still wasn’t that cheap. Although resources at home were not that

great, access to libraries’ resources had exploded with most libraries having broadband networks

that allowed for quick access to research and the ability to print articles and actually leave the

library with them. **(Point of note: There was advantages to not being able to leave the library

with articles. Students had to actually stay in the library and work to complete their assignments.

This prevented a lot of last minute work completing)**

Flash forward to now. Everything is at our fingertips. Most homes also have high speed

internet and even have high speed internet on our phones. We have twenty-four hour access to

information and theoretically, has provided better and faster access to resources. But at what