A current AP story about young students' research habits misses the mark in an all-too-familiar way. It's true, as the story notes, that today's students like to research online and many of them shun the physical library. The "solution" offered by some of the individuals quoted in the article is to somehow force them back into a library and get them to use books. This is not a container issue - it's not books vs. online. It's about sources and their relative levels of reliability and authoritativeness. With many books and journals now available online, the day will soon be here when students in many fields can and will do good, thorough research completely online. But the fact that all the good sources will be online doesn't mean that poor sources of questionable accuracy and quality won't still be available. The real issue is not about pushing students back into the library, but about requiring them to justify their choice of sources, whether they are online, in books, or in original documents or artifacts. And that applies to workplace users of information, not just students.
