Not sure what this means

I'm not sure what this means, but I thought I would recount it, since I suspect my experience is not that uncommon among contemporary researchers.

I received my weekly e-mail bulletin from the Times Literary Supplement this morning. Browsing its contents, I came on a summary concerning a published collection of old photographs of London.  Clicking on it, I was taken to the corresponding review in the TLS.  The review mentioned by title a 17-volume 1902 survey of life in London and, curious, I copied and pasted the title into my browser's Google Books search box to see what I would find.  It returned the complete set, readable online since they fall within the public domain.  This all took less than a minute from opening the e-mail to perusing a volume in the set.  I've grown so used to such sequences, that I had to stop to consider how remarkable it was.

I know this has been said before, but none of this involved a library, much less a library catalog.  Since the library and its catalog are the primary focus of my working life, this concerns me (to say the least).  Over the last few years, I have found the library increasingly marginalized in my own research.  Several years ago I loaded my library's LibX edition to my browser, and since then my forays into my library's resources occur primarily when my Web or Google Scholar searches provide a link (thanks to LibX) to a local copy of a subscription resource or offer an OPAC search as an alternative.  Most of the resources I use now, however, are non-subscription web resources.  I'm of two minds on this.  As a librarian, I'm alarmed; as a researcher, I'm thrilled.

Ed Jones
National University, San Diego