Seek and Ye Shall Find: The Internet’s Impact On Finding Information (As Seen In Chapter 9)

What a transformation the Internet has undergone in the past 40 years! It is quite a different entity than the military resource that it was designed to be. Used also by academicians, the business world and every day individuals like you and me, today the Internet is one of most powerful tools accessible to almost everyone in the world.

“Seek and ye shall find” is a biblical adage that we often use in the secular world. Searching the Internet is no exception. If you want something--the good, the bad and the “I’m not sure if it’s really wrong, but something about it just isn’t right"--you are apt to find it out in cyberspace. Therefore, it cannot be stressed enough to children, and adults alike, how important it is to use good judgment when searching for anything online.  Nevertheless, looking at the Internet from a positive-only perspective, you can. . .

Design your domicile, e-mail your esthetician or find your French friend, Francine, all online. Those are just a few of the things, from A to Z that you can do on the Internet. Two very popular search engines that can help you do all of the above and more are Amazon.com and Google, the A and the G. As a classroom teacher and definitely as a librarian, www.amazon.com was the website I relied on to purchase sets of popular chapter books, foreign language books and college level textbooks. Google, which is very user-friendly, is practically everyone’s “go to” site to find almost every location and bit of information under the sun. When someone needs to find out the length of a kangaroo’s gestation period, I am not surprised when he or she is told to “Google it.” (By the way, I did just that and found the answer to be 29-38 days, http://www.ypte.org.uk/animal/kangaroo-grey-/136.

At my school, the Internet is used for two main purposes: to secure online resources (books, supplies) and activities (lessons) for instructional purposes and to maintain communication between teachers and administrators via e-mail. Our school website is “under construction”, so we do not promote it as a way for parents or other interested parties to search for or contact us. No matter our reasons for using the Internet, the goal of our school, in general, and the library, in particular, is to have parents, teachers and students view this global system of creating and sharing information as a vehicle that can and should be used judiciously for the benefit of all.