Web Dragons

“How can you tell if you arrived at the truth if you don’t know what the truth is?” – this is SO true for young historians.

I found that especially in the first two years of undergrad when one began their research for a paper there was almost too much information out there, and one was not sure what to use and what to trust. As more and more documents are being copied on to the internet, and the amount of journals keeps increasing and becoming more easily available there needs to be a larger focus in the earlier years of undergrad (but also in highschool) on determining the validity of a source. And the constant preaching that Wikipedia is bad, is not a sufficient enough response.

In this week’s readings I really enjoyed the authors account of the history of the library. One point I found interesting was the idea that the librarians’ role has changed over time, from trying to accumulate as many books as possible to now deciding what should be kept, disposed of, and what should be stored in the limited amount of archival space. Since last week I learned how all the internet data is stored by companies such as Google, I wonder from this what will survive. The authors’ of Web Dragons noted that humans have often kept information, but it often gets destroyed over time, such as the library in Alexandria. So this makes me think that even though we are currently storing mass amount of info, it probably won’t all survive, leading me to wonder what will future generations be using to analyze us.

But the way technology seems to be going I might have a time machine and be able to see.