The Web and Research Papers

[Dorothy Day]

On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> >
> >Rothenberg bemoans students' use of Web resources
> >as an easy and less-than-desirable way to gather 
> >information for research papers. While part of his position
> >is based on the usual arguments about the quality of
> >resources found on the Web, he also notes that
> >students seem to be using books less and less, in
> >favor of readily available articles and other sources.
> >
> >While Rothenberg, as a professor, takes "much of the
> >blame for the decline in the quality of student research"
> >in his classes, he also assigns a portion of the blame
> >to libraries. At one point he notes "Of course, you can't
> >blame the students for ignoring books. When college
> >libraries are diverting funds from books to computer
> >technology that will be obsolete in two years at most, 
> >they send a clear message to students: Don't read,
> >just connect. Surf. Download. Cut and paste."
> >

This sounds entirely too much like the much-repeated claim in the early
days of the Macintosh that students who produced their papers on a Mac
did a more superficial, though prettier, job of it. Real research and
writing was claimed to be produced by those using DOS wordprocessors.
The flimsy "study" on which these claims were based was subsequently
debunked, and folks got back to teaching research and writing without
too much reference to the particular tools used to bang out the final
text. 

We live in a world where instant gratification is promoted all around
us. Students arrive with many attitudes already firmly solidified. It's
the hard job of teaching, in the classroom or at the reference desk,
that instant information is not always the "best" information--that it
has to be weighed and sifted and evaluated, just as any more hard-won
obscure source must be, before incorporation into the overall research
project. We win some, we lose some.


> >He also states: "Libraries used to be repositories of
> >words and ideas. Now they are seen as centers for
> >the retrieval of information. Some of this information
> >comes from other, bigger libraries, in the form of
> >books that can take time to obtain through interlibrary
> >loan. What happens to the many students...who
> >scramble to write a paper the night before it's due?
> >The computer screen, the gateway to the world
> >sitting right on their desks, promises instant access--
> >but actually offers only a pale, two-dimensional
> >version of a real library."
> >

And before terminals appeared in the library, many students scrambled
for the requisite 3-5 articles, of whatever easiest provenance, content
value unquestioned, to write that paper due the next day.  So what else
is new? 

I had a university professor who railed against marking up books--not
because it damaged the books, but because it amounted to "painting the
information out of one's mind," as opposed to careful notetaking and
digesting. We all choose our shortcuts, and information overload impels
us to more of them. If I took notes on several dozen books and articles,
I could review those notes in a single notebook or box of notecards. If
I now read many dozens of sources, I'd rather have my notes and markings
right on the text itself, rather than lost somewhere. That professor
would be appalled...



*****
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day at indiana.edu	
*****
	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."