j’s scratchpad

Garrett responded to something Dave Winer wrote that came out of a recent conversation he had: “Who needs an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM when you have the Web at your fingertips?” Three reasons pop into my mind about why an encyclopedia on CD-ROM might be better than the Internet: disappearing information on the Internet, misinformation on the Internet, and the efficiency of using an encyclopedia versus searching the Internet for some kinds of research.

One of the points I’m going to make when I talk to the journalism students tonight is how information on the Internet disappears. If you have something on a CD-ROM, barring any technical problems or damage to the CD, when you use it on Monday, what you read will still be there and be the same on Friday. There is no guarantee that information on the Internet will remain static like that. And I’m not just talking about sites like Wikipedia, either. (For those of you who don’t know about wikis, they’re Web sites that allow anyone to edit them and repost the content. Wikipedia functions on the idea that having many people add to an encyclopedia is a good way to pool and share knowledge. The problem, as you can imagine, is that anyone can rewrite or erase any of the entries. Also, the writers don’t necessarily have to have any credentials or do any research to add an entry. We all know how easy it is to confuse names and dates and such.) For many, the static nature of information may not be that important. It could be more important for people doing homework assignments or people in professions, like journalism and librarianship, where checking sources and being able to return to information is important.

(Of course, someone might be able to find the most current information on the Internet and not on a CD-ROM. An online encyclopedia might be able to update an entry long before they’ll distribute an updated CD-ROM.)

A big piece of my presentation is about how to evaluate information on the Internet, too. When you have an encyclopedia on CD-ROM like Encarta, there’s a certain brand that goes along with it. Part of the brand is that the information contained in that encyclopedia is reliable. Users probably know something about the company that produced it, so they may infer that its contents are reasonably current and accurate and the company has some authority regarding the product because of the established brand. It’s not always easy to judge the quality of information on a Web site.

Sure, the Internet is great and it has lots and lots and lots of information, but how does the average user find good information on the Internet? If someone is using an Internet version of an established encyclopedia, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, that’s one thing. If she’s using a search engine because she doesn’t where else to go, chances are pretty good that she’s not going to spend her time in an efficient manner and that she’s either going to have to look through several sites before finding one that completely meets her needs or she’s not going to get the best results for her inquiry. And for some things, it’s just so much faster to use an encyclopedia than to try to find something comparable on an Internet site.

Addenda 2/14: Jay picked this up, then Dave pointed to it. Today is the first time I’ve gotten over 100 hits from Scripting News (132 as of 11:44 pm). Some people get flooded when Dave points to them. I thought it was for the RSS article, but it must be this post instead.

Case in point: I learned today, sadly, that some hosting problems eradicated some blogs I enjoyed reading and have shared with some colleagues as good sources for learning about the military in Iraq.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.