Monday, June 23, 2008

Peeve of the Day: "I ran out of computer time, so could you...."

Every library card holder gets 1 hour (which is really more like 1.5 with the time extenders) of Internet time a day. So, I find it utterly baffling when people come up to me and say "I've used up all my time already today but I couldn't find this "spiffy" thing that I need to know." And I type it into Google, with straight up, no boolean operators or other tricks as simply -spiffy thing- and WHAM! First hit, all the information they need from wikipedia. For the love of all things shiny and sparkly (yes, I know it isn't a real word) - don't waste my time with your laziness. I would much rather help the people who really can't use a computer find what they need than do your dam work for you. You are in college, right? And in this case, yes. This person was asking about something they wanted to know for their college class. My faith in modern education continues to flounder.

I will say here, there are many librarians that are anti-wikipedia, and that as an openly editable source, yes, it's reliability is always in question. NO, I do not think it is a better source than finding actual information in some psychology book (that was what the spiffy thing was about) - but when dealing with certain types of people, they don't want you to find the truly valuable information, they just want the answer... yesterday. So, wikipedia is great for that.

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