ALIA education

Department of Education
Tasmania
Department of Education Library and Information Centre
School Library Bulletin, Vol 8, Issue 1, 2002

Why do we need a teacher librarian or a school library when we have the Internet?

How many times have you heard that, and how many times have you tried to come up with a short, pithy but hard-hitting reply?

Well this heading caught my eye in an edition of Teacher Librarian (April 2001, 28:4 pp 62-5). It is a collection of replies from librarians after just this question was posed by Cynthia Kahn, on an electronic discussion list.

Here are some highlights from it.

Snappy Comebacks

• If we have dictionaries, why do we need English teachers?
• Why do people buy maps? They have all the roads they need.
• Why do people use cookbooks? They have all the ingredients for a good meal.
• Why do people read the TV guide? They can change channels all they want.
• If we have email, why do we still need telephones?
• If we have a fax machine, why do we still use the post office?
• If everyone has a calculator on their PC, why do we need an Accounting Department?
• Anyone can cut down a tree - but few have the experience to manage a forest.
• Why would we spend 10 minutes looking something up in a book when we can spend two hours looking for it on the web?

Longer answers

• We still need libraries because 'everything' is not on the Internet. Not even Bill Gates can afford to digitise the sum total of human knowledge. And we need librarians because, as chaotic as the Internet is, librarians are trained to find information, and to determine which source - print or electronic - is the most appropriate to retrieve what is wanted.
• The Internet in very few ways resembles a library. A library provides a clear, standardised set of easily retrievable resources.
• The Internet is like a library with all the books on the floor. There are no standards, no librarians. The key isn't a library; it is the librarian.
• Everything is not on the Internet; authors are still publishing in books and non-e journals.
• The Internet is so disorganised that it is time consuming to find good information.
• Information on the Internet is not peer-reviewed - quality and credibility are variable.
• The Internet just provides access to hundreds of thousands of places to find data. It does not determine which of these places provides the best, most authoritative, most correct information, nor does it filter wheat from chaff. That's what the librarians do.
• The Internet is like a mountain of knowledge. Anyone can start climbing it. It's so much easier if you have a guide. Librarians are the mountain guides. They know some of the best routes to the top.
• Library collections are not actually on the Internet. What you will find is an equivalent to a card catalogue.
• The Internet is just one of many tools in our information-resource toolbox. Librarians know which tools to respond to a specific request.
• Information on the Internet is free, but you get what you pay for.
• Thousands of citations, abstracts and full-text journal articles are not accessible to the standard search engines.

For further information about 027.8 please contact:

Department of Education Library and Information Centre

E-mail: LIC.Mail@education.tas.gov.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address).