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Order Out of Chaos: Taming the Internet

As we all know, the world of information -- how it is formatted, stored, transmitted, accessed, and presented -- has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years and continues to change daily. Technology-driven protocols have revolutionized access to the library, and altered significantly the way that scholars conduct research. The revolution in information technology and its accompanying increase in volume have not been accompanied by adequate quality control.

A brief look at history provides a quick picture of the growth of technology. In 1969, a few scientific laboratories networked primitive mainframes and began sharing data. By 1972, the number of "sites" had grown to more than 200. "Bitnet" had begun. By the mid-1990s, tiny Bitnet had been absorbed into the rapidly bifurcating Internet, an electronic information retrieval system. Information seekers had never before been faced with such an overwhelming sea of data. The new sea of data, however, is a fragmented resource environment, replete with incomplete data, inconsistency in search methodology, and poorly verified sources.

The very success of the "virtual" beast presents problems for the average and serious researcher alike. Information is thrown together -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. The tightly prescripted quality assurance characteristic of traditional forms of documentation is sorely lacking. "It's the Tower of Babel syndrome," laments Librarian of Congress James Billington.

Even a casual journey down the Internet highway will quickly reveal a lack of editorial, technical, and qualitative standards. Less than 1 percent of the information on the Web is "refereed." The Internet gives us all, but ensures little; journals and books give us less, but ensure much.

The integrity of the information on the Internet is of increasing concern. Traditional safeguards of scholarly publication preserved, if not guaranteed, a generally accepted level of reliability and accuracy. The selection process for the refereed journal filtered out much unworthy material, and, although it also sometimes filtered out what was extraordinarily good, what remained was generally reliable. However, technology has made the search for traditional information much easier. Card catalogs and indices have been "computerized" and placed on-line. Controlled and unwieldy thesauri of subject headings have given way to keyword and efficient Boolean search capabilities. The simple"find" command can accomplish more than even the most sophisticated of retrieval strategies. For example, electronic access has succeeded in opening the vast storehouse of information published by the United States Government. A specific provision in the 100,000+ page Code of Regulations may be found in just seconds by entering a few simple terms on a computer keyboard.

Despite rumors to the contrary, traditional forms of publication remain major and viable resources, and at the forefront of scholarly investigation. The publication of books designed specifically for college-level use has remained constant for almost twenty years. The volume of all academic books published increased some 22 percent over the past decade, and sales of books primarily aimed at higher education increased 8 percent during the last year alone. Publication of hard copy periodicals has remained constant for twenty years.

How can traditional scholarship come together with the information revolution?

Washington Post information analyst Joel Achenbach wrote, "The information glut is hardly the apocalypse that some imagined might come at the millennium. The world's not ending; it's just becoming incomprehensible. Expertise is too extreme. There is no common body of knowledge, no common language."

The key to turning this exploding supernova into a manageable resource lies in making order out of chaos, of taming the Internet:

• Technical and editorial standards, much like those applied to journals and books, should be created.
• Measures of control over content should be introduced, whether through traditional "refereeing" or some version more apropos to a "virtual" environment.
• Searching protocols should be standardized and applied uniformly across all, or most, search engines.
• Layers of compilations of sites, i.e., gateways (the electronic version of traditional bibliographies), should be functionally defined and related to search engines.

Efforts directed at establishing some quality control of the Internet are emerging. The Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association, and a small, but growing, contingency of concerned librarians is spearheading efforts to improve levels of Internet authenticity and reliability. Berkeley Public Library has taken the lead with The Librarians' Index to the Internet, a searchable subject directory of more than 6,200 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users. And there is much still to do -- the challenge to librarians to bring order to chaos remains monumental.

-- Joe Crotts, Chair, Academic Senate, Library Access Services