Question

What has change about the type of available resources in the library today vs library of the past?

Answer 1

A library is a curated collection of sources of information and similar resources, selected by experts and made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing, often in a quiet environment conducive to study.

The traditional image of the library as a quiet place of study, housing mostly print collections, is changing. The shifts in education methods, the impact of computer technology, and the diversity of students have caused libraries to organize resources and design services that meet and anticipate the new needs of study and teaching. The shape of traditional libraries containing a large number of printed documents is in the process of being transformed to paper less libraries containing a large number of digitized documents.

The libraries in the past only held printed materials but Today's libraries are repositories and access points for print, audio, and visual materials in numerous formats, including maps, prints, documents, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, DVDs, videogames, e-books, audio books, and many other electronic resources. Libraries often provide facilities to access to their electronic resources and the Internet. Modern libraries are not only digitized but networked also. This has led to the creation of virtual libraries i.e. libraries without walls through which the user has access to information at anytime, anywhere in the world by using the modern tools of communications, such as computers and Internet facilities.