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16 Legal Reference Services Q. 1 (1997-1998)

handle is hein.journals/lgrefsq16 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL Recently, Professor Leon Litwack, Chair of the University of California, Berkeley Academic Senate Library Committee, spoke with some of the librarians at Berkeley. Professor Litwack is one of our most distinguished faculty members. As a historian, he cares deeply about preserving and passing on information, and about teaching people to do insightful research. As a faculty member who is enormously committed to undergraduate education, he has major concerns about the so-called library of the future. He is especially worried about the loss of browsing in the library and he raised some crucial questions about what the neglect of the libraries is going to mean for education. He discussed the fact that his own interest in history and ideas had been stimulated by browsing through libraries when he was a student. If students can't browse the books in a particular subject area, how are they going to get a sense of the subject and what kind of research are they going to do? Will they understand the depth and breadth of their subjects? Will they see ideas in context? These are incredibly important questions. Librari- ans have seen that using a computer to do research can create a kind of 'target' mentality in which the searcher spends hours trying to home in on a particular item, rather than to search for information in a context, They browse with great enthusiasm, but also with little Legal Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 16(l) 1997 @ 1997 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.