Cirrus@Austlit

'In one of a series of articles in the New York Review of Books...the historian and Harvard Librarian Robert Darnton concludes a passage on the great American research libraries by writing that

students today still respect their libraries, but reading rooms are nearly empty on some campuses...Modern or postmodern students do most of their research at computers in their rooms. To them, knowledge comes online, not in libraries. They know that libraries could never contain it all within their wall, because information is endless, extending everywhere on the Internet, and to find it one needs a search engine, not a card catalog. ('The Library in the New Age', New York Review of Books, 12 June 2008)

In this paper I ask what this shift in learning practices means for the teaching of Australian literature. I take it as a given that education will increasingly be electronic and that students both in universities and in schools will increasingly read books on tablets or eReaders...'(From author's introduction, 369)