Some interesting points were made yesterday by Nicholas Tomaiuolo in his talk titled “Convincing People that the Web is not the Only Answer.” The one that struck me was vanishing Internet references. OK, everybody who regularly searches the Web knows that Web pages come and go. They’re ephemeral and fragile. But most in academia think this applies to general open Web pages, not to those representing scholarly journal articles. I had been pondering this when I ran into Nick at breakfast this morning, so I asked him what his source had been. It’s an article from Science in October 2003 (v. 302, n 5646, which he’d retrieved from EBSCOhost’s Academic Search Premier, and he happened to have a copy with him. Wow, what a reference service — he knew I was going to read it and anticipated my request by having it with him in Washington DC. He kindly went back to his room to get the printout.

His main points in his talk were taken from a survey of students and faculty about use of resources by undergraduates. 55% of respondents think Web information is acceptable, 25.8% think its suspect. What about frequency of Web usage when writing research papers? 55% always go to the Web; 36.7% sometimes use the Web, and only 2.5% rarely use the Web. And how about those subscription databases libraries spend money on? Is that a preference when writing those papers? Only 18.3% strongly agree they should be used, while 4.2% strongly disagree. 25.8% are neutral on the subject, 15% disagree, and 33.3% agree.

Looks to me like some heavy duty marketing is in order to boost the acceptance and usage of subscription databases!