Firstly apologies for quoting the courtroom exchange between Tom Cruise’s and Jack Nicholson’s characters from A Few Good Men but it seemed a good title for this post.
Finding authentic information in a socially networked world can be quite a challenge. It’s easy to plug a few words to your browsing of choice and see what comes up, but how do you know the results you are given are the right results? If you searched for a topic now on Google, most likely at the top, or near to it, of your results list would be a Wikipedia hit according to Garfinkel in his article ‘Wikipedia and the meaning of truth’ (2008, 111(6) Technology Review, 84-86). Wikipedia however relies upon articles submitted by anyone, allows anyone to edit it’s articles and uses as it’s only measure of truth that the fact or opinion in the article occurrs in another article in English which is available freely online. This has caused concern for many in regards to just how authoritative Wikipedia actually is. Surprisingly though, studies have found that the sheer number of people willing to act as volunteer editors tends to mean articles are mostly correct with errors, either innocent or malicious, usually quickly corrected.
However there are many other pages on the internet purporting to be expert in one subject or another and it means that users must beware when accessing them lest they find themselves relying on information which is wrong. For information professionals this is even more important as usually we are acting as information mediators. Users who seek our help in finding information rely on what we give them to be 100% accurate. If we provide anything less, then not only have we let that user down in not supplying their need but we also damaged or destroyed the users trust in the library as the place to seek quality information.
Therefore information professionals need to be savvy when utilising online resources. We need to ensure the information we find is from trustworthy and reputable sources. Sources and information alike should also be vetted and verified before we consider providing it to a user. This is also a lesson we should be teaching the users of our library, they need to be made aware of the need to critically evaluate what they find online, be it information or the profiles of others on social networking sites. We need to educate users to validate and verify information and the sources from which it comes and to recognise the signs on websites or user profiles which suggest the source may be trustworthy or not.
1 comment:
This was a way better title :)
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