Have you ever seen or experienced the frustration of going into the library, combing the shelves, searching the browser and asking for help and still not been able to find what you are looking for? Maybe found a few books that have one paragraph on the subject you wanted to find? Maybe all you could find was a sentence in an encyclopaedia.
I’ve witnessed and experienced the missing items to complete research. Searching the school library and the local library only to find a sentence here and a sentence there. I am first and for most a teacher and I love to help people. Finding myself unable to help students find the information at their level is frustrating, worse is when I do the reading for them in order to bring the information to their reading level and attention and I can only find a sentence or two. The information in these situations are so unclear. I’ve spent hours trying to get enough sources of information for students to make informed analysis of a topic only to find it doesn’t exist in the context of the school or local area (in these cases I have actually used my own collection or added to it because the budget did not have room).
The current landscape of the library collection could see a stream lining of resources into online collections, this may assist students in finding what they need in a larger collection but only provided they are given the knowledge to be able to explore and extract the information.