Libraries in the Digital Age

A recent meeting with a colleague had us talking about things like "When we were in college..." which led to a roundabout discussion about the internet.  He is a couple of years older than me and this only seems like a keen point because the turnaround for generations seems to have accelerated, at least to the old timers.  Or is that perspective the mark of the "old timer"?  Anyway, it appears we were getting on to talking about "what did we do before the internet" and "when did we really start to use it and for what" were key headings.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available on the Web and much of it is wrong or inaccurate or distorted.  I was a late adopter of the internet because my field was literature.  If I wanted something to read I would go to a newsstand or a library or a bookstore and look up, pick up or purchase an item. However, once I started doing research, it was time to engage with the internet.

I have heard that search engines are replacing librarians and professionally prepared indexes to articles, but search engines rank Web pages by popularity, bot be expert evaluation of their worth.  Reflecting back on the conversation with my colleague, I understand that the conversation we were having was about the internet's value in daily life and its function.

The article "The Internet Archive: An End to the Digital Dark Age" from the Journal of Social Work and Education is from 2003.  In internet-speak, that is quite a while ago.  However, the article is about a phenomenon, the "Internet Archive" that was created to store web pages created after 1996 and to make them accessible to the public.

There is the expectation that what is added to the internet will remain on the internet forever.  This is a relatively recent perception in the form of a trend.  The internet was conceived as a global computer network for communication and information exchange.  The average Web page lasts for about 100 days before it is pulled or "fades away" (it is still unclear to me how something "fades away" on the internet but perhaps that's just the language of 2003).  The Internet Archive was designed to take snapshots of the internet and to store the information.  However, a user cannot search the archive by subject or keyword, only with the exact URL address.  There are ways to investigate and apply the kind of knowledge a librarian might possess, but unless you have the exact URL, the user is unlikely to find the specific web page.

However, the reason I call this a change in perception/trend because these days we seem very concerned about what actually may be uncovered or discovered about any particular individual on the internet.  I think this has something to do with the kind of information that we are heavily invested in and currently using -- social media.

Work Cited:
Panos, Patrick. "The Internet Archive: An End to the Digital Dark Age." Journal of Social Work Education 39.2 (2003). EBSCOhost.