Your Library Connection
May ’05 Library Connection Article
Isn’t Everything on the Internet?
A patron comes in asking to identify a bird he saw in the
park. Your aunt has been diagnosed
with diabetes and wants to read more about it.
When does the sun set on June 9th and August 11th
of this year? These are just
samples of a few of the reference questions for which we have found answers at
the library. Where is the best
place to go for answers?? The
answer is….it depends. First
instinct may be to go to the Internet, because you like using computers and it
seems faster than checking to see what books are available, finding the book/s,
and searching within the book/s.
Let’s start with the first example.
A patron comes in describing what he thinks was a dove.
It was a bluish color and he saw it in a local park.
First we go to the Audobon Society
Field Guide for North American Birds, a book we have in the library’s
reference collection. We look up
dove in the index, go to the colored pictures, browse through the doves, and
find that it was the Rock Dove. How
much time does it take? 4 minutes.
If we had gone to the Internet and done a Google search for blue dove, we
would have gotten 1,670,000 hits on various things like a publisher, a movie,
artwork, sheet music, Pablo Picasso, and others.
Hmmmm…..next step would be to modify the search or start plowing
through web site descriptions. How
much time would it take? Your guess
is as good as mine, but definitely a lot longer than 4 minutes!
Is it always faster and easier to go to the print sources
like reference books, non-fiction books, or newspapers?
No. When planning for the Riverside Cinema events, it became important to
find out times the sun would set on certain dates starting in May and ending in
September. I did another Google
Search with the words “sunset Iowa” and found what I was looking for in the
third hit…sunrise and sunset in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The website is timeanddate.com and the current sunset times match those
on the site, the resources cited are credible, and there is information about
the author, so I feel satisfied with the authority of the information.
I’m not sure where I would have gone to find the same information in a
print source (my assistant director tells me the Old
Farmer’s Almanac would do the trick…you may want to ask her if you have
a reference question!)
Why would I mention trying to verify the credibility and
accuracy of information on the timeanddate.com website?
When trying to decide whether to first go to a print source or to the Internet
when you need information, one very important point is whether you can find
authoritative, complete information on the Internet. Virtually any person can make a website containing whatever
information they want and post it on the Internet. The Internet is unlike most printed material in that it does
not have to be professionally accepted or edited before it is out there for
everybody to access. Often there is
a purpose for the site beyond merely providing information.
This could be a personal, political, commercial, or entertainment
purpose.
Glancing back at the initial examples, when looking for
information about health and medical topics like diabetes you want to be very
sure that what you are accessing is accurate and up-to-date.
The Mayo Clinic website is going to be accurate, but a site posted by
somebody who didn’t quite make it through medical school would not be a source
I would trust. Oftentimes medical
information and other types of information available on the Internet, even from
a very reliable source, are quite basic and don’t contain enough information
for your research. This may be when
you want to turn to something like the Johns
Hopkins White Papers in the library. You
will get a lot more information about diabetes here and you won’t have to go
to 8 websites to find the same information that is in one chapter of the White Papers. Of course
you may be able to access in-depth, accurate information easily from a
subscription database on the Internet, but you will also pay for that service on
a monthly or yearly basis (and that’s another article).
To sum all this up, sometimes it is best to go to a print
source and sometimes it is best to find the information on the Internet.
Time is a factor, and often it is faster to go to a print source.
When you have more than a million hits on the Internet and none of the
first 20 are even close to what you were trying to ask, start with a book. Accuracy of information is important, and it’s still better
to trust a published printed source chosen and reviewed by an editor than many
of the sites that are out there to sell you something or to persuade you on an
issue. Currency is important, and
the Internet has an edge in that area.
What am I trying to say?
Are books important when researching?
Yes. Is the Internet
important when doing research? Yes.
What services should the library provide to the community?
Both.
Library Tidbits:
There was a wonderful turnout of over 200 at the first Riverside Cinema event
May 17th! The next movie
at the
Dragons, Dreams, and Daring
Deeds, our summer library program, starts in June. Registration begins June 6th, and three family
evening events are being offered free of charge June 14th, 21st,
and 28th at 7:00 pm at the VFW Building.
Now available for checkout
is a LeapPad Plus Writing educational tablet, cartridges, and books.
This was
We have marked many of our
Accelerated Reader books in the same manner as the Independence Elementary
Schools in order to provide easier identification of these books to our patrons.
We will continue to mark
Don’t forget that the
library is on-line www.indylibrary.org.
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