Let us start with some history from days of old, which some of us over the age of forty will remember vividly. When we were not trudging through twenty miles of raging blizzards, catastrophic floods, and blazing heat, uphill both ways, to the one-room shacks we called schools and universities in those days, we groaned under the lash of teachers and professors who made us write long term papers requiring that we perform research. These tyrants cared little for our opinions and not at all for our "feelings" about the topics in question. Because we were assumed, by virtue of our callow youth, to be unacquainted with anything related to actual knowledge, these monsters insisted that we support our facts, opinions, and conclusions with references to experts in the fields we were researching.
In order to do this, we were required to go to places called "libraries" that housed thousands of objects called "books" and "periodicals" that contained the expert knowledge we sought. One did not type a few words into a computer and receive a list of books and articles pertaining to one's topic--no, we had to thumb through physical index cards one-by-one to find books. Finding articles was even worse: we had to consult thick volumes of indexes such as the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, the Chemistry Abstracts, the Archäologische Bibliographie, or L'Année Philologique, find some topic heading relating to our subject in the index and then look up relevant articles one by one. Since some of those beastly teachers demanded a comprehensive source search for the last ten years or even more, it was not unusual to have to plow through 10-50 separate volumes, one at a time, scribbling our results on note cards. One could easily spend days engaged in simply tracking down relevant bibliography. To make matters worse, we had to walk up several flights of stairs to the stacks, only to find that someone had checked out the book we wanted or had the periodical volume we desperately needed to consult locked in a private carrel.
Assuming that we could get physical possession of them, we then had to read the "books" and "articles." Few libraries had functioning copiers, and at 10 cents per page (a goodly sum in those days), most of us could not afford to copy with abandon. As a result, we had to "take notes" from our sources, actually writing quotes, facts, and other information on file cards or in notebooks. "Cut and paste" was an activity engaged in only by vandals and severely condemned by the librarians.
We were instructed that we not only had to find information, but also that we had to weigh it critically, not least taking into account the qualifications of the author to pronounce on the topic in question. Now, to some degree we lived under the protective aura of the realities of the publishing world: books and articles by assorted kooks and cranks were reasonably abundant, but at least the kooks and cranks had to clothe their craziness with a veneer of scholarship (or at least plausibility) sufficient to slide by an editor.
How things have changed! Today, in less than half an hour from the comfort of my office or home computer, I can perform a bibliography search, the results of which would have knocked the socks off a graduate professor and his squadron of assistants thirty years ago; I can discover whether the book I want is checked out or whether UE subscribes to the journal I'm looking for; many of the journals I use most frequently are available on-line in full text versions I can browse without moving from my office; if our library or database subscriptions don't have the book or article I need, I can submit an interlibrary loan form on-line at my leisure, and within a week or so I get what I need from another library. Some of my colleagues, such as Jeremy Rutter at Dartmouth, have created their own high-quality, web-only sites that I can consult whenever needed. Life is good!
It has never been easier to access reliable, high-quality scholarly bibliography. Why then, do students struggle with sources? Why is it that we keep receiving papers with the most recent source coming from before 1900? Why is it, with the wealth of information now available, the bibliography for a typical paper has over half its entries coming from anonymous websites or sites created by people with no demonstrable expertise in the subject they pronounce on?
In thinking about how college students ought to approach the Internet as a research tool, St. Paul provides us with some excellent guidance in I Corinthians xiii.11: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: when I became a man, I put away childish things."
So put away childish things. Put away Microsoft Encarta, put away the on-line World Book, put away Miss Grundy's fifth grade class' website on Christopher Columbus; realize that Sally Sixthgrader's class project on Isaac Newton and Igor Eighthgrader's blog on the war in Iraq have little value for college students; exercise some skepticism over the quality of knowledge available on Witchy Wanda's Wonderful World of Wicca or the level of bias in Maude Marxist's Running Dogs of Capitalism Hall of Shame.
"You are oh-so-sarcastic, Professor T. College students may get a little sloppy, but they don't use sources like these." Well, I'll plead guilty on the sarcasm charge, but in point of fact, these are exactly the kinds of sources that many college students employ when left to their own devices. I have received entire term papers based on kiddie-level encyclopedias such as Encarta; a paper that was, quite absolutely, based on a website created by a seventh grader; a paper purporting to be about the "witch craze" of central Europe relying primarily on a heavily commercialized modern witchcraft site flogging crystals, "potions," and other such impedimenta; and, of course, the occasional entire paper downloaded from such quality bastions of knowledge as Schoolsucks.com or Cheathouse.com.
Work with me to learn to track down reliable, scholarly sources. Start with the not inconsiderable resources of our campus system:
University of Evansville On-Line Database Subscriptions (most accessible only to UE people)
Specialized On-line Indexes Useful for Archaeology & Classical Studies:
NESTOR (Bibliography for Aegean Bronze topics; free)
L'Année Philologique (a comprehensive index for most topics relating to Classical antiquity: includes philology, history, archaeology, and many other topics; has abstracts; UE doesn't subscribe, but personal subscriptions are available. If you are one of my students, I will run a search for you on my account)
GNOMON (similar to L'Année; no abstracts; free)
TOCS-IN (Tables of Contents from leading journals relating to Classical Studies)