My husband and I recently took our son to the Bronx zoo, where we were in for a treat – se got to see an Okapi up close and personal. Apparently, even in the zoo it is rare to see an Okapi up close – they usually hide in the back of the exhibit. But that day the Okapi was interested in being social and was right there up by the glass.
After talking to one of the zoo guides about this interesting and unique creature and the fact that it is unusual to get such a good look, I was curious. So when I got home I took a few minutes to look up the Okapi online. I just wanted to get a little bit information, so I ended up on Wikipedia, of course. There I learned a few facts about its habitat and behavior, including the interesting fact that they like to eat the burnt wood left over from a lighting strike.
And that was enough for me. It’s all I wanted or needed to know.
So when I have conversations with librarians concerned that people are using the internet to get fast, basic information instead of coming in to the library for “real” research, I have a hard time thinking that is always a bad thing.
Don’t get me wrong. Students need to use good, reliable sources for their research, and a quick Wikipedia reference just isn’t going to cut it. Medical questions, financial questions, and other really important topics should be handled carefully and researched in much more depth. Ther eare plenty of times when there is just no replacement for good, solid library research with the help of an information professional.
But this wasn’t one of them. And there are lots of instances when basic information gained quickly is more than sufficient. I didn’t need (or want) to delve into great tomes of zoological knowledge to learn detailed Okapi facts. I didn’t need to access scientific journals via complex databases or double check the citations and cross references for multiple sources.
And I’m so glad that I live in a world where the kind of basic information I wanted was so readily available. A single search query and two clicks gave me enough to sate my curiosity and make me that much more knowledgeable about a topic that, only a few years back, I would have gone no further on – it was just not worth the effort required pre-internet to get information about something that was of moderate passing interest to me. The benefit didn’t outweigh the cost… but it does now.
But I’ve had many conversations with librarians who seem to think the availability of “quick and dirty” information online is the evil of our age. One person I was talking to lately expressed her deep concern over the “epidemic” of “shallow information” she saw sweeping across her library’s patrons. She told me (and I’m paraphrasing here) how awful it was that nobody seemed to want to become experts in anything anymore – they just wanted to get a few facts and move on to the next thing! They want a little knowledge about a lot of things, and that was, in her opinion, only resulting in “dumbing everyone down.”
This isn’t the only conversation I’ve had like this lately. And I have to say, I just don’t understand what’s so bad in wanting to know a little bit about a lot of things. Isn’t that part of what can make someone a more well-rounded person? Isn’t that the basis for a liberal arts education?
I don’t know about the rest of the “general population, but for me, I really enjoy being able to gain a little information about a lot of things with a minimum of effort. For me, It makes me feel well-read, even if I don’t spend a lot of time reading actual books. It gives me a greater sense of context in the rest of my life experiences to have a broad store of knowledge to draw from, and in some cases, even gives me the opportunity to become a little bit of a “Renaissance Woman.”
Still, other active reference librarians I talk to seem to feel that their jobs are more rewarding nowadays, as the regular “mundane” sorts of reference questions they get are disappearing. Folks can get a lot of the info they used to ask for themselves. As a result, at least two reference librarian friends of mine have recently commented to the effect that the questions they get have gone down in quantity, but up in “quality.” They don’t have to answer as many questions, but those they are approached with are “meatier” and require much more work and research - which they have time to do because they’re not so bogged down with quick lookup questions.
I don’t know, but that seems like a good thing to me! What’s so horrible about letting people, or even teaching people to answer simple questions on their own with the readily available information they have such unprecedented access to – and taking on the role of information expert and advisor for the trickier questions only?
Of course, what this boils down to (at least in my mind!) is a real need for promotion of information literacy initiatives – to help folks learn when “quick and dirty” will suffice and when we really need to do “real research.” And that’s a tall order. But more and more I think that this is really at the heart of what we need to be doing as twenty-first century information professionals.
I, for one, look forward to teaching my son the difference between wanting to know where an Okapi lives and conducting research for a paper. And I really hope that I can encourage him to go for the quick, dirty, basic information whenever it is appropriate and will satisfy his curiosity about the world around him.
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