The Internet is, by far, history’s most magnificent library. I love libraries and have spent a lot of time in serious libraries, including many days in the British Library. But there is nothing in history to compare with the World Wide Web. Back in the 1970s, when I first started writing books, if I could have owned the British Library and the Library of Congress and transported them to one place and had the most efficient cataloging system available at the time, it would not have been as powerful and effective as the 21st century World Wide Web, especially since Google started scanning vast library holdings beginning in 2002. The old card cataloguing system was helpful, but it was nothing at all compared to a modern search Internet engine. Though many of the materials on deposit in great libraries aren’t available online, a massive amount are, and the digitization process grows daily. The last time I spent a day at the British Library, which was about five years ago, I knew that I would probably never go back. Several of the books I tried to order required longer than one day to deliver, and I only had a couple of days. Further, I realized that every book I was researching was already online (since I was doing research in older books). True, I can’t order up a 1527 Tyndale New Testament via the World Wide Web and have it delivered to my desk so that I can actually handle it, but I can read it online or download the text to read on my laptop or iPhone. And that is true for a vast amount of the material that has ever been published in English. Newer books that are still under copyright can’t be read for free online, but a great many of them can be purchased in eBook edition, which I prefer because transporting, searching, highlighting, copying and pasting are more efficient. The resources on the web and the power of the search engines puts information literally at the user’s fingertips. Finding facts that would have required hours or even days and weeks of digging through books just a few years go can be obtained at lightening speed today. The Internet is a researcher’s wildest dream come true. No doubt the Antichrist will use it to his advantage, but in the mean time I will use it for the glory of God. (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) Comments are closed.
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