I was part of the last generation to rely exclusively on libraries and books for research. Back in college I would do reports looking up books and theses on an old computer catalog (or sometimes on paper catalogs) and then hunt them down on the various floors of Evans Library.
Evans became like a second home to me. if I wasn’t in class or at home that’s where I could usually be found. Despite the fact that the library staff was constantly replacing books I would always seem to end up looking for that one book that was never where it was supposed to be. If I found the book I would then be hunched over a copier making copies of the relevant pages and scribbling down bibliographical notes for reports that I would later laboriously type out on an actual typewriter. After college I didn’t need to do all that much research but the local library was always around if I needed to.
New information sources were becoming available. Computer disc sets such as Encarta were vying to replace the venerable old Encyclopaedia Britannica as a repository of knowledge. Truthfully, the couple of times I tried the “free” trials of products like Encarta, I wasn’t impressed. The articles were usually short little blurbs and never really gave in-depth details or references. They were very impressive to look at with colorful pictures and even videos but short on hard facts and references.
With the rise of the web a floodgate of information opened up to the general public. Hypertext linking and search engines simplified the tasks of research. You could enter some vague terms into a search engine and be transported to a website where people were talking about whatever you wanted. Sometimes it was a website full of experts, sometimes a website of full of amateurs. Some educators wrote articles expressing concern about the quality of research that kids did for reports using the internet.
The biggest culprit in educator’s minds was Wikipedia. Started as an online collaborative effort to provide an online encyclopedia to anyone about anything, Wikipedia allowed any person to come in and enter and edit articles without regard to their qualifications. This set off a panic in the educational community as they saw what they regarded as amateurs expressing opinions on matters that should be best left to properly qualified and degreed experts. They urged kids not to eschew the traditional library and return to books as the one and only source of knowledge.
In truth there was some cause for concern in the early days. Some contributors wrote articles based off pure opinion and conjecture. Sometimes online vandals would come in and wreck pages just for fun. Some groups would blank out pages for political or other reasons.
Wikipedia as any organization went through several trial and error periods until it finally began a more comprehensive and meticulous editing process. Articles are no longer left up to single individuals and roving editors patrol the entries constantly to monitor the quality of the articles.
In addition entries now provide (almost demand) references to source materials be included in the articles for readers to do their own follow-up research.
The error rate has dropped significantly and several studies now show it to be on par with more traditional encyclopedias.
So does this mean the death of the traditional brick and mortar library and the printed word as the repository of expert research? Possibly, but not for a generation or two.
Books have built up a type of cultural inertia in the minds of the general public. Until the last few decades it has been a major undertaking to publish books. The thinking was that if the publishers were willing to invest so many resources into a hardbound book then they must be very confident in the accuracy of the contents.
Nowadays wood pulp and ink are cheap and the major component of book costs is transporting them from the printers to the point of sale and paying the authors.
This perception that books are the only trustworthy source of knowledge is changing and more and more people are turning to online sources of information as dependable fonts of data. I would hazard to guess that within 100 years that the only books that you could buy would be presentation pieces bound in leather and custom-made to order.
Could this trend to store information online only be dangerous? Very much so! I don’t have to touch upon Orwell’s “memory hole” or the great Chinese firewall to point out how information can be erased or restricted from a culture’s collective mind. I think most people are aware of this.
However we have to be more cognizant of the fact that knowledge is power and that therefore those that can control or steer the distribution of that power are themselves powerful. We must be ever vigilant that information is not tampered with, manipulated, fettered, or restricted to a privileged few and that it can be accessed by all in its purest and raw form.
At least for now that knowledge has a safe place to rest on the pages of the printed book.
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