The leather bound, gold plated Encyclopædia Britannica’s
that graced the shelves in our family living room were a treasured item. An
expensive acquisition, bought by parents who felt it important to have good
quality reference materials on hand at home to support the years of homework
and projects faced when raising four children. Nestled next to them, were the 6
volumes of an Australia specific encyclopedia set, several dictionaries and a
thesaurus, several atlases and other reference materials. We used theses
volumes with reverence, searching out information we needed for school, and
occasionally reading them out of pleasure and a quest for personal knowledge.
Then the internet arrived, and with it the demise of status
of those beloved tomes of knowledge and fact. The immediacy of the internet
meant that when facts were changed, those facts could be changed
instantaneously on the internet. So when Pluto officially lost its planetary
standing, its change in status could be and was in many places online, changed
with some immediacy - unlike the encyclopedias on our shelves, gathering dust
and still championing Pluto as the 9th planet in our solar
system.
The idea of traditional reference materials gracing the
shelves of our studies and libraries has been undergoing significant change
over the past decade. Traditional definitions of what constitutes reference
materials include texts such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases,
bibliographies, biographies, directories, indexes etc. I would argue that there
does remain a place for materials of this sort in our libraries. What should be
considered is what form those reference materials take and how library users
are able to access those materials. The immediacy in be able to update
information rapidly, has quickly led to the poor old printed encyclopedia becoming
defunct – but not the premise behind it’s original use.
The definition of reference materials could be stated as:
Reference(noun) : the act of referring or consulting
Reference(noun) : a book to which you can refer to for
authoritative facts
Reference (verb) : to refer to
As seekers of information, we still need information sources
from which we refer to. Traditionally, reference materials were not able to be
borrowed and were housed on shelves in the library. Now, much of the
information contained within reference texts is freely available online. So it
could be fair to say that reference materials have not been abandoned so much
as having shifted format.
I think that the more significant issues facing the use of
online reference materials versus traditional reference texts, is that of
authority, accuracy and currency. Traditional reference materials were produced
through qualified / experienced authors / editors. They contained reputable
sources of information, guaranteed to have accurate information and published
by a recognized publisher.
n some ways, it could be considered that much information
online is referred to, and therefore reference material. Yet it is often not
easy to determine the qualifications of the authors / editors and whether the
information is reputable and accurate.
Wikipedia is an example of this. While it can be considered
to be reference material, being an online encyclopedia, the fact that anyone
can input fact and influence the information found within its pages makes it an
unreliable source for reference. It cannot be guaranteed that all information
is accurate and one does not need to be qualified or experienced within a particular
field to publish on its site.
‘Wikipedia is written
collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers. Anyone with Internet
access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article
prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more
important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor’ (Wikimedia,
2014).
Encyclopædia Britannica, another example of online reference
material, has successfully taken its print reference materials and moved them
online. However unlike Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica does not allow anyone
to publish information on their site, continuing to value the provision of
information that has accuracy, authority and currency. Encyclopædia Britannica
do not consider that reference materials such as encyclopedias are no longer
useful and should be abandoned. Instead they state:
‘The encyclopedia is very much alive—more than ever, in fact, in many
digital forms,
online and on mobile devices. It’s bigger, better,
and richer than it was in print, easier to use, and, just as important, online
we can nurture an entire community of learners and researchers around
the Britannica and all of our content, a community where people share
their knowledge with others at the same time they’re learning new things
themselves. The Internet and mobile interaction create a host of new
possibilities, and we’re making the most of them.
We’ve gone way beyond traditional “reference.” In today’s
networked world the scholarly and intellectual work we do serves learning in
many new ways. As just one example, we now create high-quality instructional
products for K-12 classrooms—products like Pathways: Science, which
helps teachers correct common misconceptions about science among middle-school
students.
Besides great editors and scholars, our teams include
instructional designers, user-experience specialists, teachers, school
administrators, and others—all the people you need to make great educational
products. It’s fun, and it keeps us on our toes because the markets we serve
are always hungry for new and better products, and we intend to give them what
they need ‘(Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014).
So no, I don’t think we are a point of abandoning reference
materials at all. I think we are in a time when we have a much greater choice
of reference materials that ever before, and that as teachers and teacher
librarians, we need to make informed choices about what online reference
materials we share, use and teach our students with, always espousing the
importance of authority, accuracy and currency.
Encyclopædia Britannica (2014). Encyclopedia Britannica.
Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com
Wikimedia Foundation (2014). Wikipedia:About in Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. Retrieved
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
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