AN FRANCISCO, June 20 — Katarina Maxianova, who received her bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in May, took a seminar last year in which the professor assigned two articles from New Left Review magazine. She found one immediately through Google; for the other, she had to trek to the library stacks.
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"Everyone in class tried to get those articles online," she said, "and some people didn't even bother to go to the stacks when they couldn't Google them."
For the last few years, librarians have increasingly seen people use online search sites not to supplement research libraries but to replace them. Yet only recently have librarians stopped lamenting the trend and started working to close the gap between traditional scholarly research and the incomplete, often random results of a Google search.
"We can't pretend people will go back to walking into a library and talking to a reference librarian," said Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University.
Ms. Wittenberg's group recently finished a three-year study of research habits, including surveys of 1,233 students across the country, that concluded that electronic resources have become the main tool for information gathering, particularly among undergraduates.
"We have to respond to these new ways," Ms. Wittenberg said, and come up with a way to make better research material available online.
That means working with commercial search engines like Google and Yahoo to make ever more digital-research materials searchable.
Undergraduates like Ms. Maxianova and her classmates are not the only ones conducting research from their computers. Faculty members also do it.
"One of the rarest things to find is a member of the faculty in the library stacks," said Paul Duguid, an information researcher who will teach a class this fall at the University of California, Berkeley on judging the authenticity of information found on the Web.
In the Columbia survey, 90 percent of the faculty members who responded said they used electronic resources in their research several times a week or more. Nearly all said it was a valuable resource.
While the accuracy of online information is notoriously uneven, the ubiquity of the Web means that a trip to the stacks is no longer the way most academic research begins.
"The nature of discovery is changing," said Joseph Janes, associate professor and chairman of library and information science at the University of Washington. "I think the digital revolution and the use of digital resources in general is really the beginning of a change in the way humanity thinks and presents itself."
A few research librarians say Google could eventually take on more of the role of a universal library.
"If you could use Google to just look across digital libraries, into any digital library collection, now that would be cool," said Daniel Greenstein, university librarian of the California Digital Library, the digital branch of the University of California library system.
"It would help libraries achieve something that we haven't yet been able to achieve by ourselves," Dr. Greenstein said, "which is to place all of our publicly accessible digital library collections in a common pool."
The biggest problem is that search engines like Google skim only the thinnest layers of information that has been digitized. Most have no access to the so-called deep Web, where information is contained in isolated databases like online library catalogs.
Search engines seek so-called static Web pages, which generally do not have search functions of their own. Information on the deep Web, on the other hand, comes to the surface only as the result of a database query from within a particular site.
Use Google, for instance, to research Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for governor of California, and you will miss an entire collection of pamphlets accessible only from the University of California at Los Angeles's archive of digitized campaign literature.
