Reading and Interactivity in the Digital Library: Creating an experience that transcends paper

Two articles in a recent issue of the Communications of the ACM put forth somewhat alarming claims about the role of the Internet in our lives. Columnist Peter Neumann observed that “we seem to have evolved into a mentality of ‘If it’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.’” Neumann also noted that the Web duplicates very little of the material we might find in traditional institutions like public libraries [18]. In the same issue, Graham and Mataxas argued that although most of today’s students do research exclusively on the Internet, very few of them double-check the information that they find or locate multiple independent sources to corroborate what they’ve learned [6].