The average high school student will need to do serious research for at least five papers during his four years of school, more if he is on the college track. Once he gets to college, those papers will increase dramatically. Unlike the past when every little town in America had a local library right down the street or around the corner from the student’s home, times have certainly changed. thankfully, we have the free online library to save us from failure.

How dramatically have things changed? Take one of your teenagers into an actual library and watch them gape at the books, papers and magazines. Check books out and take them with you and the kids are really going to freak out. This is the day of electronic books and the free online library, after all. Why lug books around with you when all you need is one of the little electronic readers? Why buy a magazine when you can see an interactive version of that very same thing online and papers are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Tell your kid to get a paper route and they will look at you like you are speaking Russian!

It might be sad to see the old days fade away, but the free online library did not cause the fall of the local, public library nor did it kill the real newspapers. Times have changed- who has the time to go to a building and search through all of the books. Who has the time to get down there, only to find out that the book you need just walked out the door with someone else? It is just easier and faster to do your search through the free online library and what’s more: it is usually more effective as well. Why not give yourself every single advantage when you are doing a search of any kind?

There are a number of advantages to using the free online library- not only for research but for other purposes as well. The New York Public library system, arguably one of the most famous in the country allows you to log in and ask for suggestions for your searches instead of blindly searching with keywords or just random skimming through millions of search results. The broader a term is, the more search results you will generate and it may be very difficult to narrow those down to something you can use. After all, practically every set of words will have products as well as usable information that you need, so you really have to know what you are doing. The free online library can let you see the exact books or documents to try for the information you need without all of the other fluff and filler.

Using a free online library means that you can save the time and money for certain books, books that you would probably read only one time and then never go back to or magazines that you don’t want to subscribe to.