Just imagine a place that is quiet with no hustle and bustle, properly lit, where you have access to knowledge that is still hidden from search engines. It sounds like a haven for geeks, doesn’t it? It’s a description of the environment you find in a library.
Libraries were of great importance in the past. People used to go there to find information, to study and to explore new ideas. Then came the digital era, and the internet became the go-to source of knowledge and information. Though it is seen as an old-school idea, libraries are still there. For serious researchers, libraries still offer the knowledge that you can’t find on the internet.
Though search engines provide quick answers to your queries, still they don’t have everything. In libraries you will find many older books, academic papers, and specialized texts that exist only in print. If you’re working on a project and can’t find what you need digitally, a library is the place that you must visit.
How to Research in a Library Like a Geek?
Pick up your laptop and drive to the nearby library. Find a corner where you will be least distracted and start your research. But how to research and study like a smart geek in the library, that’s what we are going to reveal in the coming sections.
Find The Relevant Books
Being a geek, you would have already completed your search online. Now it’s time to find the knowledge that is not available online. Find the books on the relevant subject. If you’re new to this facility, you can get help from the librarian. Don’t forget to explore nearby shelves for more relevant books on the subject you are researching.
Some books might be in a foreign language. Don’t leave them on the shelves; collect all the relevant books and come back to your desk.
Start from The Oldest Book
The most authentic and valuable knowledge comes from the books published decades ago. Find the oldest from the collection and start exploring. The most pressing thing for a geek is that you can’t “CTRL+F” to find the relevant information. You will have to read the glossary and table of contents to reach the exact page where required knowledge is hidden.
Snap The Relevant Pages
Be a smart geek and take a snap of every relevant piece of information that you find in these old books. You can use your phone camera to take pictures. Don’t forget to crop the images so that when you will be extracting information from these images, no irrelevant information may distract you.
Use Modern Tools
Now comes the actual geek part. You have all the relevant information from the precious old books. It’s time to extract that information to add to your research. Transfer all the images from your phone to your laptop. And now open your browser and search for “image to text converter.” The search engine will give you a list of tools.
Being a geek, you might have already used one such tool. We’ll be using that we have tested already and its image to text converter by JPGtoText.com. You can use any of your choice after testing a few tools.
This is the typical layout of almost all the image to text converters. Simply choose image files from your storage and click on the “Convert Now” button. The tool will extract the text from the images that you can copy and use in your research.
Getting Information from Non-Native Books
If the book is in a foreign language, being a geek, you will have a solution for this too. You use an AI-powered image translator like the one offered by Imagetotext.info. Image translators are advanced tools equipped with OCR and AI technology. These tools not only extract text from images but also translate it into your native language.
There’s an alternative approach to this problem as well. You can extract text using the same image to the text converter and translate it using the Google Translate or Bing Translate tool.
Complete Your Notes and Research
Now you have all the relevant knowledge that wasn’t available on the internet. It’s time to compile the notes and add them to your research. You may quote it as it is by adding a reference to the book or you can process the gained knowledge from the library in your own words to add to your research.
Here again, being a geek, you can paraphrase or summarize the extracted text using online tools to make the knowledge patches fit in your document.
The Ending Note
No doubt the internet is the smart source of information readily available. But sometimes, the information you are searching for may not be available on the internet. In such a scenario, even being a geek, you will have to visit a library to complete your research. There you will find old books and a quiet environment to complete your research.
Extracting information from old books is easy for you as a geek. You can use image to text converters or image translators to get the relevant information from old books and complete your research and study in the library.
