Sep 4, 2007

A library catalog right on your PC

By Larry Magid / Daily News Columnist

I did my graduate work at the University of Massachusetts, whose 28-story library is ranked as one of the tallest in the world. As a result, I spent much of my time on the elevator going back and forth between the card catalog and the stacks.

Today students typically don't even have to leave home to access a library catalog. Most catalogs have been digitized and made available via the Web.

But that's only one of many innovations that make it a lot easier to do research and home work whether you're in graduate school or grade school.

One of the most useful sources of basic facts are online encyclopedias. You can get free access to limited editions of copyrighted collections like Microsoft Encarta, the Columbia Encyclopedia (available free from encyclopedia.com, Yahoo and many other sites) and of course the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.

The free version of Britannica is quite abridged. To get access to the entire work you have to subscribe online or buy it on a CD or DVD. Although the CD and DVD have some multimedia resources that you won't find online, to me, the convenience of being able to access the encyclopedia without having to fiddle with a disc makes an online subscription a better value.

Britannica does its best to hide the actual cost of subscribing until after you start the process of taking out a free trial subscription (a marketing trick that I consider beneath the dignity of a company dedicated to spreading knowledge) but after digging around on the site I discovered it's $69.95 a year.

The articles from the free version of Encarta tend to be a lot more complete than what you get on Britannica's free site though Encarta, too, offers a more advanced premium service for $29.95 a year.

One way to avoid having to pay for Britannica Online is to log on through a library that subscribes to the service.

Anyone with a card from the Santa Clara County public library, for example, can get free home access to Britannica's Library Edition by logging on through the library's Web site at santaclaracountylib.org/electronic_library/. A lot of public libraries offer numerous free online resources and many public libraries will issue cards even if you're not a local resident.

Wikipedia is a free "open source" encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to edit. I occasionally use it for quick fact checking or to learn about a subject that I'm not too familiar with, but I don't ever cite it nor would I use something I learned from Wikipedia in an article without checking the facts from a primary source.

I agree with the History department at Middlebury College in Vermont which, according to the New York Times, doesn't mind students using Wikipedia but no longer allows them to cite it in papers or exams

It's not that Wikipedia is littered with errors. A 2005 study by the magazine Nature found Wikipedia to be about as accurate as Britannica when it came to science coverage. Britannica, of course, objected, calling the study "fatally flawed."

But flaws or no flaws, it is true that Wikipedia can be anonymously written and edited by virtually anyone, and there is no editorial board to take final responsibility for accuracy. Anyone can make a mistake, but I feel better citing a known source from a known author or editorial organization than one that can be anonymously written or edited.

Be especially careful about Wikipedia's citations on controversial subjects or people. Griffith, a 24-year old graduate student at California Institute of Technology recently launched his WikiScanner Web site (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/) that tracks the internet protocol (IP) addresses of people who edit articles and discovered numerous cases of changes to articles about companies that were "anonymously" edited by people using computers owned by those companies. Making changes to a Wikipedia entry is yet another form of spin control.

Other useful sites: For looking up words, I like the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary at www.m-w.com.

For basic facts about any country in the world, the CIA World Factbook is quite good (www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook).

Another excellent source for general facts is answers.com which draws on 180 different reference sources to provide information on four million topics.

I also like Ask.com. Like Google, it's a general purpose Web search engine but it more clearly presents results making it easier to find credible sources of information on many topics.

Larry Magid's technology column appears Tuesdays in the Daily News. E-mail can be sent to larry@larrymagid.com.