[640] in magellan
Interesting bit of data . . .
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Sun May 6 19:45:41 2001
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Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 19:46:01 -0400
To: itlt@mit.edu, magellan@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
Good evening,
I thought you might be interested in this report from a library
journal:
According to the Feb. 15 issue of the "Journal of the American
Association for Information Science, the percentage of citations in
undergraduate term papers that referred to books has decreased from 30% to
19% since 1996. [Philip M. Davis and suzanne Cohen's 'The Effect of the Web
on Undergraduate Citation Behavior, 1996-1999', Feb. 15.] The article also
claims that Web citations increased from 9% to 21%. The Problem is, only
18% of the URLs cited in 1996 and only 55% cited in 1999 led to the correct
Internet document in 2000."
In a very curious way, we may be moving to an academic setting that
is based not on the accumulation of codified data, but rather an
environment that is ephemeral and that source evaluation may become
impossible. And this could make the new information more suspect and less
trustworthy.
We may live in the information age, but it seems that the knowledge age is
still out there for us to attain.
Greg
