Musing Monday..Amo, Amas and Amat.

It's Monday, yes again, so let's head over to Just one more page and check out these week's Monday Musing question...

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about a reference material.

Do you keep reference books on your shelves at home? What’s your first port of call when you need information – the internet or a book?

Do I keep reference books on my shelves? Yes.
Do I use them? No, not really.
But, of course, the answer is not quite that cut and dry. :-)

Folks, I am old enough to remember the world before the Internet. Yes, there really was a world before the internet, a world full of reference books, and trips to the library to look things up. Imagine that...having to actually leave the house to go to a library to find the answer to your questions.
Unless you were lucky enough to have a set of encyclopedias. I can remember the day my mother made the not insignificant financial investment to buy my brother and I the set. I can remember the world of information it opened to us, conveniently located right there in our house. I could book at them for hours and hours. I believe it was the Encyclopedia Americana, a 30 volume set, that surprisingly is still in print. It had it's own little bookcase...and I have no idea what happen to it. I guess at some point, in some move, we gave it away.

But that was often just the starting point for research, for a school paper or whatever. The encyclopedia was a starting point but after that it was off to the library, searching through those huge card catalogs, in the big wooden cabinets with all the little wooden drawers, with thousands and thousands of individual paper cards listing each book. Gosh, I wonder what happen to those cabinets..I would love to get my hands on one of those. Then off to the stacks, or more rarely, to the reference section, where the librarian would carefully hand you the book, the book that could not be removed from the reference room. You would take it to the big tables they always had in libraries, where you would sit and copy the needed information by hand into your notebook, because yes, it was before copy machines too!

Now, you just boot up the laptop and type your question into the Google thingie on the toolbar and the answer is your in seconds.

So are reference books a thing of the past? No, I am not sure they are. Granted, I never use the dictionary or thesaurus sitting on my shelves. The internet is way faster for that. But I do still use books for some things. Gardening, for example. I have a fair number of books about gardening subjects and I do use them. Unlike the internet, books offer the big picture, in a form that is easy to 'page' through. And for me, with a visual subject, nothing beats the photographs in a book.
Lighthouses are another subject I frequently use books for. For a quick question, yes the internet is fine, but for something more in depth, I find a book...or several books..easier to get the needed information from.

Then, maybe I am just a dinosaur.
Maybe I am a holdover from the last generation of people that remembers doing research without the internet and retains a certain fondness for it. Or maybe there actually is an advantage that a book can offer over the computer screen in some cases. I would argue there is. Or maybe I just like to argue.
Either way, as I have said before, they will have to pry my books out of my cold, dead, fingers.

Amo, amas, amat? Don't know what it means? Well, look it up! I will lend you my Latin/English dictionary. A real paper book dictionary. Or you can Google it I guess...

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