[PW] what is lost when students do internet research

[Donna Halper]

Forgive a bit of a rant, but I thought you nice folks might empathize 
with me on this issue.  One of my biggest complaints about student 
reliance on the internet, even on wonderful databases of old 
newspapers and magazines, is that the articles are removed from their 
context.  I was in the stacks at the Quincy (MA) Public Library 
yesterday seeking an article from a bound volume, and not only did I 
find the article but seeing the actual magazine from whence it came 
gave me some perspectives on it that I didn't have before.  Often, 
the opinions expressed in a given article are also threads that can 
be found in other articles in that same magazine, giving me an idea 
of what the public thought was important at that time.  This is 
particularly useful when trying to understand the perceptions people 
had during that era, who they admired, who they disliked, who was 
considered controversial, etc.  The big name celebrity stories 
(Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King, etc) are what 
students know about because they've heard of those people and know 
how to search for them; but in each era, there were other people who 
were regarded with great interest, and whose stories were talked 
about just as much, even if they are not remembered today.

Alas, as I have said on this list before, all too many online 
databases no longer even give the page number of the article.  This 
is not a frivolous point, since the hard copy of the periodical will 
often put the stories considered important on page 1, and without 
page numbers, there is no way to know what the reader actually saw 
when he or she bought the publication in those days before the 
internet.  The Washington Post is one of the few major newspapers 
whose online version gives the page numbers that correspond to the 
hard copy of the article.  But if you read most newspapers online, 
the location of the article is no longer available-- just the article 
itself, with no context whatsoever.   And as for databases, while I 
have friends at Proquest, the page numbers on some of their databases 
are wrong.  So unless there is a page map function on the database (a 
function most of my students seldom use), there is no way to 
accurately find out how and where the editors had placed that article 
in the hard copy of the publication.

I believe this reliance on cyberspace versions of publications can 
have an effect on how students perceive the information.  Seeing only 
the internet version of the article (with no context, no page number, 
no way of knowing where it was situated in the hard copy) can easily 
give the impression that it was regarded as equally important with 
all other articles, when in fact it might not have been.  I doubt 
most students today even think about the hard copy versus the 
internet copy, and in historical research, browsing the hard copy may 
provide clues that the quick search of the database won't 
provide.  That's why I truly do not understand why some databases 
(Time magazine's archives for example) have eliminated page 
numbers.  I still believe they perform a useful function.  While 
internet research is faster, the speed with which we can access an 
article may lead us to believe we've gotten what we needed to know, 
when in fact a few important elements have been left out.  [rant mode off]