Generations of students knew what it meant to spend hours in dusty libraries researching papers and projects. It involved painstaking checking of reference cards, searching shelves and paging through heavy tomes to turn up each precious little nugget of (usually outdated) information. This would then have to be laboriously copied to a notebook, compared with other snippets of research and finally reworked into the student`s own words.
It may be argued that there was something almost sacred in this slogging quest for knowledge, but I for one would far rather go online and get it quickly. And so would millions of others.
Recent news reports state that one of the world`s best-known encyclopaedias, Britannica, saw its revenues plummet by 60% from 1990 to 1996. It ended door-to-door sales in 1996 and now does most of its business charging subscribers to access the content online.
Britannica.com is vastly different to the first Britannica offering published in 1768. Not only does it take up far less space than the reference sets of old, it is also more affordable for the man in the street, and it can be updated regularly - with colourful pictures and multimedia clips to enrich the learning experience.
Britannica is not the only encyclopaedia publisher to move away from paper. World Book and Grolier, the maker of Encyclopaedia Americana, is also focusing more on online products.
Instant info
It`s hardly surprising. Despite the ongoing complaints about slow, expensive Internet access, just about everyone with a PC would far rather search for information online than wade through heaps of books in a library. And not only because we are the generation of instant gratification.
With the Internet, you can tailor your search and turn up a world of information and opinion about anything at all within seconds, especially if you use a search engine like Google.
It remains to be seen whether instant access to pretty much all the information in the world will result in a generation of dunces.
Tracy Burrows, Editor, ITWeb
Try researching "what should I do about the beehive in my ceiling?" or "where does Joe Soap work?" or even "what`s that funny rash on my child?" in a library and turning up an answer within five minutes. Settling Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble debates, finding a recipe or pinpointing a little-known spot in the world can now be done with a couple of clicks of a mouse. You can have a word explained, compared or translated in seconds. In a matter of minutes, you can go on virtual tours of countries, cities and museums, see the world`s art, hear the world`s music and read the best literature ever written.
Of course, there are a few downsides to researching everything online. In the quest for authoritative facts, you`re going to turn up an awful lot of misinformation. And the lazy student could easily cut and paste an entire project without ever reading a word of it. Knowing kids, this probably happens rather a lot.
It remains to be seen whether instant access to pretty much all the information in the world will result in a generation of dunces. Even if it does, it probably won`t matter much, as long as the next generation knows how to search the Net for all the answers - rather like a collective brain outsourcing.
So the swing to online reference content may mean "bye-bye reference books", but it doesn`t necessarily mean the complete demise of the traditionally published word. While the Internet can turn up relevant facts in a nanosecond, it can`t deliver the tactile pleasure to be found in curling up with a beautifully printed and bound book on a rainy day for a long, leisurely read. At least, not yet.
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