Last week I met with the preacher of my mom’s church again, for a bit of lunch and some talk. We ended up not talking about religion hardly at all, which I found surprising but not unwelcome. Our discussion veered off, somehow or another, to education. I think that he asked me how classes were going, and it spiralled from there.
We talked a lot about the state of public education in America (not good), and how things have changed since he was in college (early 80s, I believe). Him talking about researching stuff for his papers made me realize something which had hitherto never occurred to me: research used to be a lot more difficult, and a lot more time consuming. Certainly, if you’re really going to be digging into a topic, research still takes a considerable amount of time. But with the internet and huge conglomerations of academic journals (EBSCOhost, I’m looking at you), complete with full text search, finding some initial sources is fairly quick. With EBSCOhost alone, I can search across something like 5,000 academic journals, all at once, and have results back in 5 seconds or thereabouts. Not only is one able to search that many journals at once, but with that search, one is also searching across time. Many of the journals go back at least 10 years, and all of those articles are brought up within a search.
That’s quite a different picture than what the preacher told me about his researching: heading off to the card file, looking for his subject, and then going to the stacks; finding a book, browsing through it, and then going from that book to another via the bibliography. And that’s just with books – with journal articles, it was even more time consuming. The preacher and I didn’t talk about journal articles, but a friend of mine (hi, Chantal) was willing to fill me in on how it worked: you’d check a journal index, usually published yearly, to find journals on the topic you were after. You’d then have to hunt down the journal(s) in question, and basically dig through them to see if there were any articles you could use. Chantal said that her university had all of the journals she ever needed, but I’m sure folks who attended smaller universities / colleges ended up having to request journals via interlibrary loan or a similar system. I can just imagine waiting 2 or 3 weeks for a journal to arrive, just to find it didn’t have anything in it you could use.
Thinking about these two means of researching brings to mind two different fictional scenes: one, showing a Star Trek computer fellow bringing up reams of information – exactly what he needs, of course – with a few key strokes; the other, showing Gandalf sitting down in the libraries of Minas Tirith for days on end, sorting through document after document, hoping to find some scrap about what he was after. Certainly, perhaps these two scenes are exaggerations of how things were pre-internet and how things are now – but I don’t think the exaggeration is that great. It really is amazing how the internet has changed things.
I am, however, still holding out for my hovercraft vehicle…
Comments 4
A) It’s hard to imagine how inconvenient finding anything out was before the Internet. Dozens of times a week I’m looking up some little thing. Who was that in that show? What other books did this guy write? What does the appendix do? Who came up with the Slinky? All taking little more work than a snap of the fingers to find out.
B) Oh man, card files! That brings back elementary school memories, though during my time there was a transition to a computer search.
Posted 03 Oct 2007 at 10:54 pm ¶Joshua: Yeah, it is hard to imagine. I can’t say I’ve ever really wondered about who came up with the Slinky, but I get what you’re saying.
I remember card files – vaguely – from my very early school years. I remember them being in the library, and I remember being told about them, but I don’t actually remember ever using the things. I think our middle school library was so small, it was basically easier to just walk through the stacks than bother with the card files.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 7:24 am ¶Old as I am, I do remember indexing cards from my childhood. In college, things had improved of course, with most academic material already digitized (not much content yet, though, nor meta data or tags).
In general, though, I try to blank the pre-internet era from my mind. It was a dark and gloomy period.
Sometimes, I even fail to imagine what the mid-nineties internet looked like. AltaVista on Netscape Navigator? Ouch.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 3:46 pm ¶Nils: “In general, though, I try to blank the pre-internet era from my mind. It was a dark and gloomy period.” Hah!
Luckily I didn’t have to endure much of it at all. I can barely – and I really do mean barely – remember a time when I didn’t have the intarweb, but it’s a very, very brief speck of time in my memory. I think we had internet by the time I was 11 or so.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 9:52 pm ¶Post a Comment