Thursday, January 25, 2001

tech.life@school | Joyce Kasman Valenza

We need to recognize Web's blind spots

Students doing all their research online will miss a wealth of information. They still have to learn about resources.

Most weeks, you'll find me gushing over sites on the Web that are just too great to miss.

This week, let's consider what's not on the Web. Let's also consider the valuable resources that are underused because they are not accessible through a Yahoo search.

I'll use a couple of sad but true stories to illustrate my point.

Last spring, I sat on a panel as one of our brightest seniors presented an intriguing thesis: "Hitler's personality was primarily responsible for his rise to power." Her paper cited several online journal articles and higher-quality Web references. It was well-written, but her research had glaring holes. She missed Mein Kampf, and she missed William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She missed all the biographies we had on the shelves and all the many other thoughtful studies available in bookstores and larger libraries. Though she and I had been in the habit of consulting on research throughout the year, she did much of this one at home. With the new independence offered by the Web, students lose a critical element in the research process, human consultation. And they often neglect critical sources.

Just recently, another student approached me and was at the end of his research rope. He needed information on the history of breakdancing. He'd spent a full weekend searching the Internet and found lots of personal pages devoted to "moves." When he finally asked me for help, we considered the time period when breakdancing was at its peak. We dusted off a few Readers' Guide to Periodic Literature editions from the early '80s. We retrieved articles from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News. "Does anyone know about this?" he asked me.

After that, we hit our school's online subscription services, where we found journal articles that linked breakdance historically to hip hop, explored breakdancing as a form of self-affirmation for inner-city youth, and related it to the poetry of the streets. None of this was available on the free Web. When students are researching the Kent State massacre, the Challenger disaster, the war in Vietnam, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, they do themselves a great disservice limiting their exploration to the free Web.

Certainly they will find material on the Web. But for all these topics, they will miss hundreds of comprehensive print nonfiction titles, each written by authors who may have spent years developing expertise in a particular area.

For areas of modern history, much of which occurred B.E.D. (before the era of instant digitization) or around 1994, they miss a wealth of contemporary reporting and analysis. When they're researching the Civil War, they will discover that Mathew Brady's extraordinary photographs are on the Web. What they might not discover is that Bruce Catton's thoughtful commentary is not. Children need both. And we need to let them know.

The fact is, while there are many generous people, government organizations, museums and universities sharing their knowledge by creating useful sites posted on the free Web, the vast majority of authors and publishers are still in the business of making money, and they just aren't giving their work away. Though more magazines and newspapers draw readers to their sites by providing online excerpts from current and past issues, if you want access to the full content of the archive, you will have to buy it.

So beware: If you are doing serious research, you won't find much of the material you'd find in a library's reference, nonfiction, or modern-fiction collections on the free Web.

Here's the general rule of thumb for what you won't find on the free Web:

And that brings to mind a curious phenomenon I've been observing.

Many students who have access to the materials provided by the pay or subscription services of the Web may not recognize their value. They are either unaware or they choose not to exploit these rich services. Instead, they mechanically travel to the one or two Web search tools whose addresses they remember, often bypassing their best sources. Please help me fight dependency on Yahoo, or AOL Search, or Excite. Parents and teachers: Be aware your children have access to much more!

The state, through ACCESS-PA database, offers a suite of subscription services that can be accessed at home.

The offerings include:

Within the next month, the state plans to extend the suite of material in the database with the addition of:

Your school likely provides remote access to additional subscription databases that support its specific curricula.

A few tips:

Parents: The database password list may never get out of their bookbags unless you know to ask for it.

Parents and teachers, remember: check those bibliographies early and often for quality, scope, and evidence of scholarship.

The vast and powerful Web still has its limitations. But you don't have to take my word for it. I asked my friend and colleague, Internet education guru Kathy Schrock, at http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/, what she found lacking on the Web. She responded: "What is not often found on the free Web is material that cites its source. The only way to tell if you have found quality information on the Web is to first conduct research in the traditional way - in your library, in reference books and print materials - to allow yourself to create your knowledge base on your topic. Only then can you decide if what you find on the Web to use is worth using and supplements, complements, or disputes your research!"

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Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim, Pa. Her column appears each week in tech.life. E-mail: joyce.v