In 2001, World Wide Web users witnessed the launch of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that allows any user to contribute by writing and editing articles.
The rise of electronic resources was marked in 2007 when Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, with more than 2 million articles.
For students such as industrial engineering senior Affaf Bokhetache, Wikipedia is a primary search engine.
‘Usually anything or topics of research I don’t find on Wikipedia, I Google it and with citations I’m not restricted to anything,’ Bokhetache said.
However, with this surge of availability for online resources, students often do not make the effort to explore reference hard copies, said Mildred Joseph, assistant librarian at the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library.
the effort to explore reference hard copies, said Mildred Joseph, assistant librarian at the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library.
‘Back in the old days what (people) would do is go to the library, or if you were lucky and your parents had a set of encyclopedias. You’d have to look that information up in the encyclopedia and read about it,’ Joseph said. ‘These days the tendency is (students) go and read about it in Wiki. There’s nothing wrong with that except they don’t do all the research that is involved with it.’
Because of the high demand for electronic resources, Joseph said libraries are ordering fewer books but more online subscriptions.
‘Most information, especially academic research information, is published in journals and that costs money,’ Joseph said. ‘Libraries subscribe to those journals. We take your student fees and we literally pay millions of dollars to access these online databases that give you accurate information.’
Contrary to popular belief, Joseph said, librarians are pro-technology, but valuable information is still found in printed literature that is hard to access just by browsing the Net.
‘Everything is not online,’ he said. ‘That’s the key.’
Kinesiology junior Juwairia Siddiqi said a world without Google is hard to imagine.
‘I pretty much use Google for everything, maps, Gmail, or if I don’t know anything about something I just Google it,’ Siddiqi said.
But there was such a time. It wasn’t until 1995, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin engineered a search engine called BackRub at Stanford University that the concept of Google took root.
BackRub used too much bandwidth and was not used for more than a year on Stanford Web servers, according to Google’s corporate information.
In 1997, Page and Brin decided to rename a revamped BackRub after a play on the mathematical term ‘googol,’ the name for the number represented by a one followed by 100 zeros.
Older generations are still adjusting to the widespread and rapid use of the Net.
Biology sophomore Marcella Orella said her parents, who are originally from El Savador, Mexico, did not know how to use the Net.
‘It was frustrating because I’d have to show them where to type the address and how to do it,’ Orella said.
Business senior Sana Kara said teaching her dad to use the Internet paid off in the long run, because the technology allowed him to start his own retail business.
‘My dad would ask about everything and if I was studying or in the middle of something, I’d have to stop what I was doing and show it to him every time,’ Kara said.
