A year ago there were an estimated 800 million publicly accessible pages on the Web, and there are a great many more now. For web users, the questions of the day are: how do you find the information you want, and how reliable is it? When print was the main medium of information distribution we used aids developed over centuries to find the facts we sought. These included library catalogues, and other guides such as indexes to books and journals. We could ask people who knew these tools to get the information for us.
As for quality, we were working in a time-tested landscape, where the reliability or quality of information was related to the nature and economics of publishing. Disseminating information required capital, expertise and organisation. This did not mean that it was always reliable, but the difficulty of publishing meant that editorial and legal checks and balances were applied. This process led to an assumption of basic standards of reliability. Published material was open to critical tests by the press and academic communities.
The Web works differently. At first sight it seems that there are now many more ways of finding information. It can be done from home, work, or wherever there is access to a terminal. The user no longer has to go to where the information is stored. This seems a much more straightforward way of doing things. In fact it can be more difficult.
Search engines like altavista.com or google.com promise easy access to information. Users ask for certain words or phrases. The engine will often reply with a list of thousands of web pages. This seems very impressive, but it is actually misleading. As the article in last week's Computimes pointed out, even the best-performing search engine is missing over 80 per cent of pages containing the term sought.
There are other problems of currency and coverage, and problems with some of the advanced searching features of search engines, but enough has been done to demonstrate that Web search engines do not operate like the search tools that library users are familiar with, such as library catalogues or the sophisticated indexes to academic journals. This is hardly surprising, given the vast quantity of information they handle. Web search engines are indispensable, but they are still in development and must be used with an awareness of their characteristics.
A second issue arises when information is found. How reliable is it? The Web contains much high-quality data but also a lot of extremely unreliable information. Anyone can publish on the Web, from anywhere. Outside the controls of an agency which may have a public duty of care or a commercial reputation to protect, individuals may publish recklessly. They may deliberately publish information that is untrue or misleading.
Because of this, it is more difficult to verify information on the Web. Some of the factors that nurture trust in printed information still operate. Large branded sites - and the sites of universities, specialist publishers and public companies - carry information that is authenticated by the reputation of the sponsoring institution.
But there is a lot of plausible information on well-organised sites which does not stand up to scrutiny. The search engines that find these sites do not have quality controls like those developed for academic information. They do not filter information in the same way.
We must learn to be discriminating if we are to obtain authentic and current information from web sources. We will need to be able to identify useful sources, to navigate between them and to evaluate the information offered. In an age where we will all be involved in formal learning for much of our working lives, and where a great deal of that learning will be done independently using modern communications media, these information handling skills will be key skills.
This need has been recognised by the Irish library profession. DCU library already has a programme of information skills training, as have other Irish university libraries. We will need to continue to enhance this training, and to extend it to the wider community if the objectives of the Government's information society initiatives are to be met effectively.
Paul Sheehan (email: paul.sheehan@dcu.ie) is director of library services at Dublin City University