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| Newsletter - October 2001 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The World Wide Web on the Internet is one of the wonders of the modern world. Certainly it is an enormous stimulus to the spread of knowledge and of information. But it should be used skillfully. In the September 20 1999 Forbes (www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0920/6407210a.htm ) Stephen Mannes discusses the reliability and completeness of information available on the World Wide Web in his article When it's not on the web. Mannes quotes the computer scientist
Weisenbaum who wrote in rather dramatic terms in 1976: Mannes goes on to discuss the ease with which the Web can be searched, and that some "students and scribes" think that once they have scoured the Web, they have done all the research needed. Mannes also quotes the witty US information specialist/publisher Barbara Quint who refers to the "unreachable web" - the web pages even the most sophisticated web "spiders" cannot reach. Mannes makes the point that few books are on the Web, complete archival runs of newspapers are not on the Web and that there is "free Web" and "fee Web" with password protected "toll-booths" preventing free-loaders. Mannes' article is useful as it reminds us of the dangers of relying solely on the Web for information. It also reminds information users how important it is to evaluate critically the quality and scope of information collected. This is not new! It has always been important to evaluate information critically:
The difference is that today anyone can publish anything on the World Wide Web - it is a self-publishing medium. In pre-Internet days the critical evaluation of information was undertaken by editorial advisory boards, who took on the onerous task of reading manuscripts submitted to them for publication, evaluating them and referring them to other experts BEFORE publication. This is, or was the "value-added" that traditional publishers provided for their readers. Tina Kelley of The New York Times has also published a fascinating article about the reliability of information on the Web on 4 March 1999 in which she says "Web surfers must deal with uncertainty: Is the information true, unbiased and free of hidden sales pitches?" She also cites Don Ray who wrote Checking out lawyers (MIE Publications, 1997). He suggested applying the J.D.L.R. test - it Just Does not Look Right test. Does it have spelling or grammatical errors and a sloppy design? One could add, does it state which organisation the author is attached to? When was it published? Kelley tells an amusing story of frustrated tourists from Canada and Kansas who drove many miles to see the whales in the Minnesota River! Obviously they were not skilled at recognising the spoof posted to the Web!! Students at Mankato State University in Minnesota had falsely claimed Mankato had sunny beaches, an underwater city and whales in the river and a year round temperature of 70 degrees F! Linda Cooper is one of the leading information professionals in the US with a wonderful sense of humour and enormous knowledge and integrity. In the recently published Supersearchers do business: the online secrets of top business researchers (M. E. Bates, CyberAge books, 1999) Linda says "I almost never provide a client with anything from the Web unless it is an association, university or corporate web site". She also checks with web masters and if she gets a recording saying "Hi this is Bob and we're out of the office" the Web site is not sent to the client! Also if the site is a government site, or if the publisher of the web site has a responsibility to communicate official information, then chances are you could rely on the information. But perhaps the J.D.L.R. test should still be applied! Now let's just slip back 30 years ago and have a look at what the experts were saying then about reliable and complete information. George Uhlenbeck was a Dutch born British resident physicist and discoverer of "electron spin". He was also the Managing Editor of the scholarly (some may say "heavy") journal Physical Review Letters. George also asked, "Is the literature worth retrieving?" In his article, he quoted the editor of the British scientific journal Nature who had complained that scientific articles are often unintelligible. Already Uhlenbeck was looking forward to computerised information retrieval and its implications. He predicted automatic storage and retrieval would lead to unrefereed (i.e. not checked by editorial boards) material increasing the "storage of worthless material". (Physics today, Sept 1966, 52) Hmmmmm! I wonder whether George
Uhlenbeck would have believed there were whales in the Minnesota River?
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