By LAURA GOTTESMAN
"The Internet is here to stay, right or wrong. It will hurt, and it will take us awhile to get it right … [but] the public needs us [reference librarians] more than ever. Our role has changed from gatekeeper to teacher of critical information evaluation skills."
Irene McDermott, a reference and systems librarian at the San Marino (Calif.) Public Library and a columnist for Searcher magazine, opened the fall season of the Library of Congress' Luminary Lectures @ Your Library series on Oct. 25 with her talk "Surviving the Internet: Strategies for the High-Tech Reference Desk."
McDermott, whose book, "The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High-Tech Information Desk" was published in September by Information Today Inc., spoke to the gathered crowd of Washington-area librarians about the role that librarians can play in helping to guide their patrons to high-quality Internet resources. The subtitle of her talk—"How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Web"—addressed the underlying anxiety of librarians grappling with change.
McDermott outlined what she called the "Five Quality Points" that she looks for when assessing the quality of a Web site: authority: What are the authors' credentials? "A good Web page is always signed"; currency: Is it up to date? If it hasn't been updated in more than six months, the page is "jurassic"; accuracy/bias: Might the creators have a hidden agenda?; commercialism: Are the creators trying to sell something?; and scope/coverage: Does the information answer the question in sufficient depth?
She also described what she called "the three World Wide Webs":
- the "Open Web"—anything online that can be found freely with a search engine;
- the "Gated Web"—online resources accessible only by subscription; e.g., Expanded Academic (ASAP); Contemporary Authors; the Oxford English Dictionary, etc.; and
- the "Invisible Web"—databases that aren't found by search engines and can only be accessed through a particular page or front-end. McDermott pointed to the Library of Congress' American Memory Web site as an example of this (http://memory.loc.gov/).
McDermott cautioned the audience that librarians should be careful not to take their skepticism to an extreme, in spite of the questionable accuracy of some Web resources. Sharing an example of this from her own life, she spoke about how online, freely accessible medical resources had helped her find information on clinical trials that helped to save her husband's life when he was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness.
When someone in the audience asked, "So what do you say to the argument that we are taking questions away from local libraries?" referring to the Library of Congress' new Ask a Librarian Service, McDermott responded, "It seems to me that there are plenty of questions to go around … the beauty of the Web is that it doesn't matter where you are."
The Luminary Lectures series at the Library of Congress is part of a national, public education initiative called @ your library™, the Campaign for America's Libraries, which is sponsored by the American Library Association. The Library of Congress, along with libraries in all 50 states, is participating in this multiyear campaign designed to showcase public, school, academic and special libraries nationwide and to remind the public that libraries are dynamic, modern community centers for learning, information and entertainment.
For more information on the Luminary Lectures series, including cybercasts of selected programs, see the Luminary Lectures @ Your Library Web site at www.loc.gov/rr/program/lectures.
Laura Gottesman is a digital reference specialist in the Public Service Collections Directorate.