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Plus ca change… - The Library and Undergraduate Education
Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Evan Ira Farber
Are today's students less naive? Certainly about some things, though cynical" might be a more appropriate word than naive." Students do not believe what they see in the supermarket tabloids or other sensationalist magazines one finds at a checkout counter. They are skeptical about much of what they read in newspapers about politics and not without good reason. But they do believe almost anything that comes from a computerized source. It results, I think, from what Theodore Roszak (1986), professor of history at California State University, Hayward, called "technological idolatry" in his book, The Cult of Information. That attitude of students, the belief that whatever appears on the terminal or whatever comes from the printer is true, is a much greater danger today than, say, the danger of students not knowing about the claims to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays or not recognizing that books published by certain special interest groups arc hardly reliable guides to American political history. Why is the danger so much greater now? Most obviously, perhaps, because of the proliferation of available sources. The example of students' lack of library skills one used in earlier days was that of a beginning student coming into the university library, going to the card catalog, and finding dozens, maybe hundreds, of items on her topic, not having the vaguest idea of which ones were most important or useful, so probably ending up by just checking out the first few items. Today it is worse; a student can easily get into the library's electronic catalog and through it to other libraries' catalogs and perhaps several or more other relevant databases. Confused and overwhelmed by the multiplicity of references, the student turns to some quick simplistic way of getting the information. Not only has the student probably missed much better sources of information, but the quick and precise responses at the terminal give her a sense of accomplishment, of a job well done.
But there is yet another, even greater, danger. Earlier I mentioned students' finding books that denied Shakespeare's authorship. There are, of course, ways of evaluating such books, even if one is not an expert in the field and one tries to teach students some of those ways--the use of reviews, the author's and publisher's credentials. Those are some of the filters that scholars use. But on the Internet? A delightful cartoon in the New Yorker a couple of years ago encapsulated the problem nicely. The cartoon shows two dogs conversing, one seated at a computer, the other on the floor. The one seated at the computer says to the other dog who's looking up at him: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' That is true, of course. Nobody knows whether you are a dog, or a Nobel Prize winner, or a flake. Unless one is an expert--someone who knows the field and the players--one really cannot tell anything about the validity, the usefulness of the source. It all looks very much the same. Even experts cannot always tell. Fortunately, academics are beginning to recognize the problem, and a group of librarians recently began to make an effort to solve it. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing the effort points out that what is needed is a project "to impose some structure and standards" on the Internet, that "students and faculty members ... need authoritative 'subject access'--a single place on the Net where they can be referred to resources that experts consider worthwhile. . . (Jacobson, 1995, p. A29). But it goes on to mention some of the problems such a project will encounter--problems of support, cooperation, bureaucracy, to say nothing of the fact that the Internet is a moving target, constantly growing and changing. It will be, one must recognize, a long time before students will derive any benefits from the application of "structure and standards' to the Internet.
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