Libraries, quality of information and the internet age

There's been a lot of discussion about the new library plan, saving money by consolidating libraries in the schools and such from the T&G blog. Some have suggested that libraries and librarians are obsolete these days.

Just thought I'd say a word about libraries and reference librarians. As any good researcher knows, there's STILL (yes even in 2008) no good substitute for a good reference librarian. In engineering school I work-studied most of my years at the school library. At that time much of the material was on a variety of media including paper, microfiche, journals, magazines and some of it online. You saved orders of magnitude of time by simply describing your quest for information to one of the reference librarians so they could point you in the right direction. You still need to have a methodology for determining the quality of information which they also help with.

In the past 20 years there has been a great deal of digitization and with the advent of Alta-vista, later Yahoo! and Google, online search has been a great tool for finding information about a variety of topics. But I think it still has its limits. For instance, Google tends to weight your searches on popularity. What if you're researching a topic that few people know about (ie you're an expert). Also libraries have access to many sources of information that are not otherwise publicly available. The reference librarian can help with this even with online searching itself to narrow things down. The other problem is weeding through to find quality information you are interested in.

Wikipedia for instance is essentially hearsay. They do publish "contested" links at times, but the depth of treatment is not really there. It's usually OK, but not enough if you really want to look into a topic in any depth. What's more important is getting the information first vs a rigorous treatment of "peer review".

On that topic, it's easy to find on the internet so-called "proof" of anything from the existence of space aliens to Global Warming denial to 9-11 government conspiracies and claims of cure for cancers. You can really wile away the hours sorting through the chatter. It might be fun, but it's not always effective.

A healthy dose of skepticism rooted in fundamental critical thought needs to be engendered while reading through some of this stuff. Quality information which a reference librarian can guide you to can show scientifically "peer reviewed" literature while developing your own sense of didactic reasoning skills.

In the medical or law professions, finding good information in a timely manner can be a matter of life or death and justice or injustice. In our personal lives, as we prepare ourselves to compete in the workforce, missing outdated or incorrect information can be the difference between finding a job, keeping it, growing a business or going out of business entirely.

In short, I think libraries and reference librarians play an important role in our community by enabling individuals to develop a sense of understanding so we can address the challenges that need to be faced in the new century.