From “Libraries: A Paper Wikipedia” (Mitch Smith, InsideHigherEd.com) comes a reminder that today’s college undergraduates have never known a world without Wikipedia:
Undergraduates trying to look up Bob Dole’s birthday (July 22, 1923), the population of Mauritius (about 1.2 million) or the state insect of South Dakota (the honeybee) had to do so Wednesday without the only encyclopedia many of them have ever known.
With Wikipedia blacked out for 24 hours in protest of a pair of anti-piracy bills under review in the U.S. Congress, students scrambling to write early-semester research papers without the open-source encyclopedia posted panicked remarks to Twitter. And just as fast as the 18-22-year-old cohort tweeted about their plight, 30-somethings nostalgic for late nights spent poring over Encyclopedia Britannica sent snarky retorts.
But at dozens of universities, students received supportive tweets from a place where Wikipedia is often a dirty word: the library.
“No Wikipedia, No fears…. The library is always here with all the answers you will ever need!” tweeted the staff at Temple University … And at Detroit’s Wayne State University, distraught students were encouraged by this message: “If you’re missing Wikipedia today, don’t forget that the library is always here to help you.” …
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[According to] Scott Vine, a librarian at Franklin & Marshall College …[s]ome students enter college having done most of their previous research on Wikipedia, he said. With that in mind, Vine wanted to make sure students had somewhere to turn if the blackout threatened their classwork.
“A lot of first-year college students have had very little experience using an academic library,” Vine said. “Most of the time, they’re going to go to the Internet and looking something up.”
“It’s never something that’s really been talked about on campus,” he said. “But today, it’s a lot different. There’s been a lot of reaction …Everyone’s like, ‘If Wikipedia is gone, I don’t even know how to research anymore,’ ” he said. “I think encyclopedias have been removed from our idea of ways to find information.”
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/college-librarians-reach-out-students-during-wikipedia-blackout#ixzz1jxes5JqP
