Many new college students are surprised by the size of academic libraries. For example, the library at Calvin University (formerly Calvin College) occupies 100,000 square feet on four floors and contains more than 1.3 million items. New students quickly discover that their high school library in no way compares to an academic library. One surprising difference between a high school library and an academic library, however, is the ratio between digital material and paper material: high school libraries often have a higher percentage of digital material than do academic libraries! Why is this? A high school library can subscribe to one or two databases that provide hundreds of thousands of articles and this "collection" is often sufficient for high school level research. Consequently, many students come to college having used only digital resources and expect that to be the case in college. The truth is, much of the information you will need for college-level research will still be in paper format. The universe of knowledge is exponentially larger than the subset of knowledge that is currently digital. For many research projects, the best sources will only be available in paper.

There will be a great temptation to use only digital material, to collect the most convenient material and not the best material. Be willing to delve into the library's collection of paper sources. Your final product will be better for having done so.

These pages were written by Glenn Remelts. and edited by Jeffrey L. Nyhoff and Nancy Zylstra
©2005 Calvin University (formerly Calvin College), All Rights Reserved

If you encounter technical errors, contact computing@calvin.edu.