When I think about libraries and
their content, I find it hard to not think about growing up and the time I
spent in libraries in the past. I grew
up during the infancy of the internet and before it became the dominant method
of data exchange – in English, I grew up when libraries were the main source of
information when you needed it. It is
funny how the internet has changed this to the degree that it has. I spent countless hours in a library growing
up but spent a grand total of maybe 10 hours in NC State’s library while
getting my degree in the middle part of the last decade. With that being said, libraries do have 2
things that the internet does not necessarily have: credibility and
concentration of information.
Credibility is something that a
source must have when you use it within your own works. In the case of the internet, this is often in
doubt due to the nature of the internet itself.
Any person at random can blog to their hearts content about any subject
that suits them (see this blog). As a
result, I would say that almost 95% of the information available to you on the
internet is of questionable credibility or outright wrong in some
situations. The library on the other
hand does not have the credibility issue.
Now I am not saying that anything written on paper is the Gospel, but if
it is published by a credible publishing company I would tend to believe that
the author is someone worthy of citing.
Sure, there are many different books with conflicting opinions that are
almost blogs in their appearance, but again, the fact that they are published
makes them infinitely more useful when trying to cite than someone trying to
cite my blog. Even Wikipedia, the
encyclopedia of the internet, is a collection of user submitted facts. Most of the facts on the site are substantiated
and proved by the staff of Wikipedia, however there is still plenty of information
on that site that has not been proved and is essentially the opinion of the
user that submitted that “fact”. I love
Wikipedia for getting the quick skinny on random information, however I will
never use the site as a source (this is also due to my degree – my instructors
never allowed wiki as a source).
Concentration
of information is the other reason that I grew up loving libraries and still am
fond of them today. One of the things
that drives me nuts about the internet is when you Google something, you come
up with a bazillion hits, most of which are in no way associated with your
query. I compare trying to get
information off the net to looking at the night sky – there are nuggets of
information out there (stars) that are great to get but you have to wade
through mountains of irrelevancy (empty space) to get to them. This is not so in the library. If you want to find information on the civil
war, go find a book on the civil war. It
can be that easy (especially when the libraries have really good cataloging).
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