We need to do academic written work since we are primary students even until we are having tertiary education in university. As we know, academic written work is a "must" in our educational system. In this interact, communicate and technology era, the internet is probably one of the greatest inventions in the century. But the presence of conventional libraries will still be one of the choices for students to get their knowledge, information and ideas in their academic written work. So, let us proceed to compare and contrast the effectiveness of libraries and the internet in doing academic written work.
Before the invention of internet, researchers need to stay at library for whole day to complete parts of their journal or research. From here, we can know that we need to spend a lot of time in order to get information from library. Libraries normally are large and neat, we need to run from floor to floor and rack to rack to get the books that we need. After found the books, we need to sit down and read through the books page by page to understand and gain the information that we want. Libraries as a source to get information is time consuming. However, when we are using internet to get information, it is speedy and accessible immediately. We just need to "click" and use the powerful search engine then we can get the information from A to Z immediately. By type the keyword, we can immediate access to a considerable amount of information with reference to a particular topic. Use the internet as source of information is time saving yet multiple access.
Apart from that, the flexibility of time in gaining information is also one of the comparison between internet and libraries. As what we know, libraries usually have limited time and it own operation time to use and visit. We need to walk or drive to libraries to get the information needed. We need to plan and think wisely before we move otherwise our time will be wasted. So, the time for use libraries is not flexible. However,the internet offers the flexibility in term of time. We can complete our work,assignments or information getting in anytime and anywhere we want. This is because internet is available 24 hours a day instead of libraries that open only for operation time. We can surf internet without time limit and geographic boundaries in order to get information.
The reliability for the source of information for both the internet and library are different. When we are doing assignments or researches, lecturers will ask for the scholar articles or journals that has reliable sources to prove our statements. The information in libraries are normally primary sources which did not edited or changed by others. For instances, original diaries, newspaper, maps and journals. The resources in libraries have all been individually selected by a trained professional, to fit specifically to the school's educational programs. So, the resources from libraries is reliable and valuable. Although internet has great diversity of information, but the resource of internet is uncertain. The potential for encountering incorrect statistics and other false information is high. For example, Wikipedia, one of the popular websites to gain information, the articles on it can be edited or rewrite easily. Therefore, we need to be more careful when we search the information from internet and check for the reliability of the information that we get.
In a nutshell, internet and libraries as the two major sources of information for use in academic work have its own advantages and disadvantages. Internet is easy to share and get information while libraries has reliable resources. Understanding in strengths and shortcoming for both of them is really important to conduct an academic written work. As a student, we need to use the internet and libraries wisely instead of use them without planning. Otherwise we need to do a double work to get our fruit of hard work.
No comments:
Post a Comment