Monday, September 22, 2008

Unreliable web

There have been calls for kitemarking on the web, in case us poor users are misled by unreliable information all too freely available at the click of a mouse

I would have more sympathy than I do if I could easily gain access to sites which I have good reason to believe reliable, but many of these need an Athens number or demand money first – the British Medical Journal, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, anything in JSTOR … . There is no way the occasional visitor wants to afford all this

Public libraries help a lot by taking out subscriptions such as to the Times Archive & the Oxford English Dictionary, but there are limits