Wednesday, January 28, 2009

MIS week 2

"The techno-utopian belief that access to unlimited information automatically translates into understanding and knowledge has proved to be false."
-Better Together, pg. 48

I thought that this quote really hits home, especially for students. I don't know how many times I have been writing a paper or just looking up something random and got hundreds of thousands of hits from google, only to find that just one website actually had what I was looking for. This is exactly the point brought up earlier in the reading that emphasizes the importance of librarians to help distinguish good information from bad. I think that this is one of the main reasons why libraries haven't been replaced by the internet. With so much information available out there, libraries and librarians are as important as ever, but in a slightly different role.

1 comment:

  1. This is a great point I had not originally considered when I read the article. With so much garbage available on the net, inexperienced users may be extremely vulnerable in accepting false information or opinions as fact. It is an important duty of the librarians to help sift through this information and help people find accurate information they are search for.

    ReplyDelete