Search Me?, from the WaPo
But it’s a good & thoughtful article & worth reading, even though it’s one of about a brazillion now on the subject. But for my money, this is the most interesting part:
After the university digitized its card catalogue… use of the collection jumped 50 percent — simply because books were easier to find.
The university here is Stanford. It’s refreshing to see some actual data on this. Of course it makes sense that electronic access increases use, and we know it’s true in other contexts, but there’s just so little data out there to support that assertion in library contexts. And one could debate the causality of the increase in use being caused by ease of findability, but at least there’s a correlation.