Gone are the days of searching through stacks of books to do research, Now everything you need, including documents that have never been published, can be found online.
Texas A&M, in conjunction with 4 other Texas universities, have formed an electronic library.
Colleen Cook is the dean of libraries at Texas A&M. She says the Texas Digital Library will take information like dissertations and thesis and provide the entire text online.
"We will be collecting information on all subjects, all knowledge, just whatever research input our institutions happens to be and rather than having to put things on paper, publish them and put them in libraries. They will be able to go to the web to look something up and have full text information readily available at your fingertips," says Cook.
The resources can be used by professionals and students. The joint effort should eventually lower library costs.
"If we can make available our research output through mechanisms like TDL, we will not have to spend the huge numbers of dollars that we'd have to spend on maintaining, exterior duplicative journal collection throughout these libraries," says Cook.
Tammy Nguyen is a senior biomedical science major and says this joint library will make researching a lot easier.
"I think its good, cause everything is in one place and I just have to go online to one site and find everything instead of searching at each different school checking out their libraries and what they have," says Nguyen.
If all goes well, Texas will eventually collaborate with other states. The electronic library is in the development stages, but A&M already has more than 1100 documents to look at.
The entire system is expected to be launched within the year.