Research better done in library than online
Linda Sharp
reference librarian at Hesburgh Library
I am writing in response to Laura Kelly's article in the March 21 edition of The Observer entitled"Homework Got you Stumped? Help is just a Mouse Click Away."
Though I believe Laura was being facetious when she made claims like "everything you need can be found online," I think the article made me uneasy because it contributes to the growing misconception that the "dotcoms" of the web have the expertise, commitment and incentive to provide students with a comprehensive body of free scholarly materials.
I think the more publicity these type of Web sites receive, the more legitimate they seem. But rather than try to talk anyone out of using them, I would like to temper the hype by offering other issues to consider. For example, your tuition dollars have already contributed to the purchase of many online resources superior to the ones mentioned in the article.
SparkNotes.com was described by Laura as a site for students seeking easy answers to the most pressing academic problems. This may be true if your most pressing academic problem involves doing cursory research on the approximately 150 authors contained in the SparkNote.com database or on literary titles that, for the most part, show up on reading lists in junior and senior high school.
But a better choice for pressing academic research in literature would seem to be the Literature Resource Center, which contains biographical coverage of more than 109,000 writers and more than 10,000 "biocritical" essays on authors and their works. It also contains over 4,000 explications and overviews of prominent literary works and links to more than 5000 Web sites focusing on major authors and their works.
This gem is available online from the Library's Electronic Resources Gateway.
Laura also mentions reference works contained in SparkNotes.com's dictionary.com iTools.
While these sites do have some handy sources, they are already available to you from the Virtual Reference Desk and the Student Virtual Reference Desk. But more than these free web resources, you have access to important reference works you won't find free on the web such as the Oxford English Dictionary.
Britannica Online is going to go back to a being a paid subscription service so it will probably disappear from the free research Web sites. You will, however, still be able to access it from the Library's Electronic Resources Gateway along with the Literature Resource Center.
There are many other reasons why reliance on Web sites such as those mentioned in Laura's article is unwise. Who is going to maintain, update and add to these sites? Since they are free to use, profitability for the site owners is uncertain. How long will they be able to last? Who is doing the contributing?
SparkNotes.com says Harvard students and graduates are their contributors. But when I looked at the actual SparkNotes.com, all I saw were names of contributors and no other background information. I e-mailed the folks at SparkNotes.com and asked if I could find out more about the contributors (I'm waiting to hear from them).
I wondered what their fields of expertise were. Was it appropriate to what they were writing about?
SparkNotes.com states that all authors "specialize in the subjects they cover." That's pretty broad. I wondered if the staff was full or part-time, paid or voluntary. This would have implications for the reliability of the site if contributors were constantly changing.
And yet, Laura's article suggests this authorship model is preferable to one composed of "ancient professors or academics."
Does it seem likely that Harvard students have a keener interest in your academic achievement than professors?
I will close by saying the obvious. At this time doing Internet-only research defeats your academic aims. You are not involved in intellectual discovery but in churning out projects based on what you can access from your dorm room. It puts restrictions on your end product because you've restricted your input.
As renowned Web consultant Jakob Nielsen has said, "Anything that is great in print is likely to be lousy on the Web."
Consider also more things are being published now than ever before and only a fraction of them are available on the Internet.
You'll be paying a high price for chaining yourself to your dorm room. So, it's your call. You can spend a while surfing the Internet and find sources you can piece together for a paper. But, if you want more from your academic career than perfecting "McResearch," consider spending time on the Library Web site and discovering what's there.
Linda Sharp
reference librarian at Hesburgh Library
South Bend, Ind.
March 30, 2001
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, April 2, 2001
