Reading online is great. It is fast. It is convenient. It is accessible. There is still, however, a lot of important information that you cannot get from the Web. I am not writing against e-books, even though they too have weaknesses (e.g., footnotes do not work, and reading endnotes electronically is about as frustrating with e-books as it is in hardcopy). I read e-books frequently, and many books with which I have been involved have been published as e-books. Rather, my concern is that younger readers increasingly seem almost unaware of books as a medium. When I say, “Get thee to a library,” I am not saying, “Go to a building where books are housed” (although that would be a very good thing to do). Rather, I am saying, “Please realize that there is a great lot of important information, which you need to know, that is contained in books that have not yet been digitized.”

It is fine to check online to get oriented, but if you are going to make significant decisions about what is true, if you are really going to access the vast sea of learning (information and analysis) represented by all the books in a given library, you need to add hardcopy books to your learning and studying strategy. By omitting hardcopy books from your learning strategy, you are handicapping your ability to learn, and you are harmfully limiting the sources that inform your study.

The Web creates the illusion that it is comprehensive, that on it one can find anything and everything. It is not true. There is an immense amount of good stuff online, but it is still the case that a lot of what one finds is just dreck. It is one thing to sort through that dreck with some background. It is quite another thing to begin your study with and limit your study to the Web. If you are just starting your study of a field, how (without beginning with trusted, vetted sources) will you be able to sort out what is true and what is false, what is thoughtful and carefully done and what is not? There is still a lot of professional scholarship that is not available on the web. A good bit of the best scholarship is found only between the covers of books. It is not online.

There are three rooms in any (decent) library: the reference room, the stacks, and the periodical room. The reference room contains encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like. This is where research begins. The function of a good reference work is to get you started on a new topic. A good entry tells you what you need to know and gives you direction where to go next (primary and secondary sources). In my field, most reference works are not found online. They are found almost exclusively in the library. Eventually that may not be true, but for now it is still true. If you start your study without the reference room, then you begin with one hand tied behind your back. You will have to do for yourself what a couple of good entries in a reference work has already done for you.

The second room in any library is the stacks. The stacks are the heart and soul of the library insofar as the stacks constitute the great collection of books on the rows of shelves, which you might see through the window as you drive to the coffee shop. The stacks contain a collection of both older and newer volumes of two kinds: the actual stuff you are trying to learn (e.g., let us say you are studying Augustine—in that case it would be Augustine’s works), and books about the stuff you are trying to learn (i.e., books about Augustine). This is known as primary and secondary literature. There are primary sources online, but typically those primary sources are older texts that are out of copyright. They may be fine, or they may be dated, and the translation may have been revised. Without recourse to a printed edition or various editions, you may not know what you have on your screen. You may get a peek at or even a chapter from the relevant secondary literature online via Google Books, but you are probably not going to be able to see the whole book. Again, the Web only takes you so far. You must get hold of a book (which is found in a library) in order to make progress.

After you have visited the reference room to get oriented, and stopped by the stacks to collect your primary and secondary sources, the periodical room will be your last stop. This is where journals and magazines are kept. Journals are collections of articles usually limited by discipline (e.g., history) or a sub-discipline (e.g., a given period in or approach to history). In my field, there is a Sixteenth Century Journal. It is one of the places that scholars publish their research, oddly, on the sixteenth century. Increasingly it also contains research on the seventeenth century, and it has become a repository for a lot of “early modern studies,” but it still relatively specialized. There are journals that specialize in medieval studies, New Testament, Old Testament, and hundreds of other fields and topics. The advantage of journals is that they are where you find out what has happened in a field since the most recent books were published. In academic writing, most books are collections of previously published journal articles (and more). So, a good journal article may be a synopsis of a lot of research that will appear later in expanded form in a book. Typically, it might take less than a year to get a journal article published, but it might take a year or two or five to get a book published. So, what you see in a journal might not appear in a book for some time.

It is true that print magazines are dying and going online (for a price, of course). Some journals in some fields are accessible online, but there are still academic journals that are not easily or cheaply accessed online. This means that in order to fill-in your study, you need to move beyond the Web to a library.

This post is really a plea to younger readers to recognize the limits of the Web. There are important and even essential reference works, books, and journals that cannot yet be easily or inexpensively accessed online. That learning is still found only in print media. That might be a source of frustration, but it should not be. There are some things that can be done quickly without harm. A text message can be short, quick, and helpful. True learning, however, is not usually done quickly or easily. It takes time and reflection. If you really want to learn, you will find a library a really useful place to visit.

Editors Note: This was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2013.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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