Believe any fact can be found on the Internet?

I was most supirised by This Letter on The CBC. Maybe things are different in Canada? I can literally see it from here, and it doesn\’t look any different, eh?

\”Librarians have come to believe any fact can be found on the Internet. But, like a piece of Swiss cheese, the Internet is riddled with holes. Library budgets have been slashed and the Internet is offered as the low-cost saviour. Stories abound about finding mountains of information on any topic within minutes of logging on. However, the Internet is also clogged with dated info, misleading info, false info, and downright off the wall info. And Jeeves couldn\’t help you separate the wheat from the chafe even if you asked him.

I was most supirised by This Letter on The CBC. Maybe things are different in Canada? I can literally see it from here, and it doesn\’t look any different, eh?

\”Librarians have come to believe any fact can be found on the Internet. But, like a piece of Swiss cheese, the Internet is riddled with holes. Library budgets have been slashed and the Internet is offered as the low-cost saviour. Stories abound about finding mountains of information on any topic within minutes of logging on. However, the Internet is also clogged with dated info, misleading info, false info, and downright off the wall info. And Jeeves couldn\’t help you separate the wheat from the chafe even if you asked him. More from The CBC


I\’m saddened to hear of Libraries ditching books that haven\’t been checked out in the past year or two. A Librarian will protest that one file copy will be kept at the main branch, but we all know that, when a cold subject suddenly turns hot, there will be too many readers for that one copy which will inevitably be listed as \”Lost.\” Redundancy is one of Life\’s survival tactics and Libraries, by rushing to embrace the new technology, put our very cultural heritage at risk. The Christians of the Dark Ages had little interest in Greek and Roman writers of the Pagan Era. When, some centuries later, the Renaissance went to check out a few of these authors, it found most of the books were lost, stolen, or recycled.


Don\’t think that we\’ll respect the New Technology more. The Motion Picture is just a century old and we\’ve already seen half of the films produced crumble into dust. Our 500 channel television universe plays the same reruns of popular shows, while hours and hours of programming goes mouldy in some dark archive. How will we play vinyl records when turntables cease to exist? Most turntables in use today don\’t even have a setting for 78s. CDs have been offered as the digital information manna, but I find the jewel cases they come in are designed to scratch them into immediate obsolescence.