ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240012
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: BEVERLY GOLDBERG KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
The abundance of information available on the Internet is often cited as one of the glories of the much-ballyhooed electronic superhighway. There are said to be 3.5 million documents on the World Wide Web, with some 6,000 new ones added daily.
And now, electronic enthusiasts tell you that not only is everything you'd ever need to know on line, but the new browsers and gophers and search tools - Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Magellan - rapidly being introduced make it possible to find that information instantaneously.
Well, keep in mind that when you use the Internet to access information, nothing is instantaneous - yet.
And depending on what you want the information for, remember that you must put some effort into determining whether what you find is really worth having.
When you sit in front of your computer, facing a screen filling and refilling with words - many totally irrelevant - in response to your search instructions, you quickly realize the extent of the problem.
When searching for information the old-fashioned way, you know what to trust. You have a lifetime of experience in assessing those sources, beginning with your first trip to the school library.
You trust an article that appears in Science magazine because somewhere along the line you learned that any article appearing in that magazine has been reviewed by experts before publication.
An article in the National Enquirer evokes quite the opposite reaction.
And if you come across a book that puts forth a completely new theory, you check who published it. If it was published by a university press connected with a school of great renown, you are likely to accept it as having merit.
But the same idea appearing in a self-published book or one published by a vanity press would probably be ignored - or buried beneath a considerable number of grains of salt.
The variety of material that appears on the Internet raises additional issues. An undergraduate at a major university recently turned in a biology paper in which some rather questionable facts were attributed to a ``Working Paper'' by someone at another name university.
When asked about his source, the student explained he had found the paper on the Internet. The professor called a colleague at the other university to ask about the author.
The colleague, who had never heard of the individual, discovered that the writer was an undergraduate - and that the paper had received a rather low grade.
In another case, an editor at a publishing house reports that he had spent a great deal of time working with someone who had inquired, via e-mail, about an idea for a book and had mentioned a university affiliation.
Again, the author was an untried student (though one who might someday live up to the promise his letter revealed) but not someone with the standing for writing what amounted to a textbook.
If the inquiry had been sent by mail, the lack of an official letterhead would have alerted the editor, saving valuable time and not raising hopes that had to be dashed.
The point of this is not ``stay away, stick to the library, shun electronic information.'' Indeed, if you are to survive in the next century, you must learn to access information electronically.
The technology will improve so that everything will flow more easily and more smoothly through the now-crowded lines. And more structures for organizing information will be developed.
Until then, what you need is a framework for coping with the abundance, a way to find those clues or signals that will help you through the plethora of information.
The first step is to avoid believing that everything appearing on line is equally valuable, even though all information looks alike on screen.
Ask yourself a series of questions: Who is the author, what is the author's affiliation, what else has the author written?
Hard questions? Not if you are on line. Then search some more. Look for references to other materials by that person. Who published that materials?
Now look for information about the person's affiliation. Search for other articles on the subject and check the notes. What are the standard sources in that field? Try locating experts through chat groups dedicated to the area you are exploring and ask members for reliable sources of information.
As the future draws closer, this sort of scrutiny will become less and less necessary. It is a problem that many, including librarians, are already working on.
Soon, we will have gatekeepers and standards, a prospect that angers the first proponents of this new technological universe, who believe in a totally unfettered electronic universe. It is, however, a logical solution to the problem that has emerged as the electronic world has opened up to include so many of us.
But those of us who are becoming increasingly dependent on acquiring information swiftly cannot wait until the problem is solved.
We must find ways to create our own gates, to filter out useless, misleading and just plain wrong information so that we are free to tap into the world of knowledge that awaits us with the click of a mouse.
LENGTH: Medium: 98 linesby CNB