Joyce is the School Librarian at Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, Pennsylvania. Joyce writes a weekly column called "techlife@school" for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Recently, I took some time to chat with my students about their research habits. One message came through loud and clear. They truly believe they can get all the information they'll ever need on the Web. This belief results in a significant degree of compromise.

Though you'll find few teachers more excited about the power of the Web as an information tool, I am also keenly aware of what is missing. Allow me to share a couple of sad but true high school research disaster stories.

Just last week, I worked with an eleventh grade English class whose teacher wanted them to find solid, scholarly literary criticism. In my ten-minute strategy session, I pointed students to my newly prepared online pathfinder listing Dewey numbers of books, both circulating and reference, and linking students to such high quality, full-text subscription services as Gale's Literature Resource Center and Scribner Writers Series. I watched for half an hour as the students completely ignored my advice and returned to Yahoo and Ask Jeeves for material. Finally, one student approached me. "Mrs. V., there must be more criticism on Of Mice and Men." I walked her to the shelves where we found ten volumes of collected John Steinbeck criticism, three of which were anthologies of essays specifically on Of Mice and Men. She was amazed.

And then there was the recent valedictorian who presented the intriguing thesis, "it was Hitler's personality alone that led to the Holocaust." Though her works-cited page included some impressive Web sites and online journal articles, it was obvious to the panel of teachers judging her thesis defense that she had major research holes. She neglected to consult Hitler's own words in Mien Kampf, and she missed Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She missed the ten biographies we had on the shelves. And she missed the quality subscription database Facts.com's archive of reporting from the 1940s and the Student Resource Center's primary sources. Though she often consulted with me for help, time constraints inspired her to do this one alone. It was a risky trade-off.

The convenience and independence that makes the Web so appealing, also removes a critical research component-the human connection. Our students, by mere function of their age and limited experience, simply don't know what they don't know.

Don't be deceived. The concept of universal free access to high quality information has not been realized. While a good many generous individuals, government organizations, museums, and universities are sharing their knowledge by creating useful Web sites, the vast majority of authors and publishers are still in business to make money, and they just aren't giving their work away.

WHAT WE PAY FOR ON THE WEB
Let's consider what's not on the free Web:

• High quality reference books other than some almanacs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias that are not particularly threatened by loss of sales, or titles that have found some alternative revenue through their Web presence
• Nonfiction, often the bulk of a library's collection, the analytical biographies, collections of literary criticism, and richly illustrated science and history books. Students researching the Civil War, the Middle Ages, or Ancient Rome will certainly find material on the Web. But for these and so many topics, they will miss hundreds of comprehensive nonfiction titles, each developed by authors who have spent years developing expertise in a particular area of knowledge. While they may discover that Mathew Brady's extraordinary Civil War photographs are on the Web, they may not discover Bruce Catton's thoughtful commentary.
• Any book (fiction or nonfiction) that is still under copyright: generally any book written by an author who is alive or who has been dead fewer than 75 years
• Comprehensive current journal, magazine, and newspaper indexes and the full-text that supports them
• Magazine articles written before 1990 are generally print-only and are part of an electronic black hole of current history. They are seldom available either on the free Web or through subscription services. This hole includes such often-researched topics as: Woodstock, Kent State, the Challenger Disaster, the War in Vietnam, and yes…the history of break dancing. Though there is information on the free Web, students will miss the contemporaneous reporting without such tools as the Readers' Guides, print articles from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, or microfilm or subscription electronic access to The New York Times.
• Material removed as a result of Tasini vs. The New York Times. In June 2001, the Supreme Court found that freelance writers should be compensated for the reselling of their material in electronic format. This decision inspired many publishers to remove large chunks of articles from online archives rather than confront liabilities or compensate writers. As a result, material spanning two decades of current history (tens of thousands of articles, including full newspaper archives) has been removed wholesale from both the free and the subscription Web.

You'll notice that I've been careful to distinguish the limitations of the free Web from other online material. Over the virtual rainbow, on the subscription side of the Web, students can access substantial archives of full-text journal and newspaper literature, as well as high quality reference content. And though many of our students have free access to these materials through their schools and libraries, I've been observing a very curious phenomenon. Students do not initially recognize the value of these services. Perhaps they are unaware, perhaps it is too challenging to find, or perhaps their teachers do not require them to stretch beyond the free Web. Instead, students mechanically travel to the one or two Web search tools whose addresses they remember, habitually bypassing their best search tools and their best sources.

The vast and powerful Web has its limitations. Together we can fight Yahoo- or AOL search-dependency. As teachers, we can encourage an awareness of what's missing on the Web. We can prevent research disasters by requiring that students seek not just the easy material, but the best material. We can lead students to higher quality search tools. We can encourage the purchase and use of subscription databases and make them readily available through our links and through remote access. We can promote the use of books, journals, and newspapers. And we can consistently evaluate student bibliographies as an important component of student products.

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