Internet or on-line databases?

Article published on www.qwam.com on 8 June 2000

The children’s room metaphor 

Picture a child’s bedroom. You push the door open. The bed is made and all the toys are put away. You open the chest-of-drawers, to find all your kid’s socks in pairs and arranged by colour. Now picture a second bedroom. A toy is in the way of the door and you struggle to open it. You pick a path carefully across the room, stepping on Barbie dolls, and pull open a drawer. Full of unpaired socks. You pick out a blue sock and finally find its twin underneath the bed fifteen minutes later. You can at last get your child off to school! 
The first room is the world of on-line databases. Everything in it is arranged by professionals, specifically documentalists. You have to pay, admittedly, but you save time. The second room is the world of the Internet. This is free, but no one bothers to tidy it up. 

The Internet is great!

The Internet is a rich and fascinating world for anyone seeking information, newbies and professionals alike. The Internet provides access to a wealth of information that we could not reach before: 

• Alternative information. We can find out about an ecology group or read comments by dissatisfied customers (for example www.mcspotlight.org) 
• Grey literature. Here are published scientific articles currently being assessed by the major reviews. 
• Websites for little-known start-ups and extremely comprehensive websites for multinationals 
• Guru and specialist pages: see www.clinicalwatch.org
• Discussion forums and their FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). 
• Chat rooms and rumour sites

This wealth and slightly unbridled freedom turns the Internet into a jungle, rife with danger for the information seeker. For example:

• Disinformation. Press reviews on official corporate sites are frequently incomplete (out of date, censored or limited selection only)
• Outdated information. Some companies publish websites but fail to maintain and update them.
• Stupidities. Young students, for example, who fancy themselves as hackers and boast of their exploits only to be refuted publicly - http://www.attrition.org/errata/charlatan.html
• Noise and distractions. This may be exciting information but it has no bearing on what we are seeking and is a total time-waster.

Where do on-line databases score?

On-line databases cannot be bettered as sources for three types of information. 

1. Press archives. The Internet gives us free, daily access to The Echos daily newspaper, but a subscription is required to access their archives. A researcher working on a competitive study, and thus seeking everything published about a competitor, has neither the resources nor the time to subscribe on line to hundreds of sites. He is better off using the services of on-line databases that have already arranged access to these sources. For example, QWAM provides access to Dialog, containing archives from thousands of dailies. 
2. Market studies. These are undertaken by specialist firms and require a substantial investment in time, expertise and money. Understandably they wish to see a return. Complete market studies are very rarely found free-of-charge on the Internet. All you get is snippets of information in advertising slogans. These snippets are then picked up by hundreds of other sites and the information multiplies and is distorted under a mirror effect.
3. Financial analyst reports. Bottom-of-the-range financial analyst reports can be accessed via the Internet. Some reports are available free-of-charge or for a modest fee on financial sites (such as www.hoovers.com ), but the Investext on-line database provides the fullest reports.

Additional tools

The Internet and on-line databases are all additional tools, not just through their various spectra of information sources but also because the information is not researched in the same way. 

• A poorly-formulated question generally produces nil results from an on-line database and the question has to be asked another way. With the Internet, however, a poorly-formulated question produces all sorts of distracting responses.
• With the Internet you can e-mail an author directly about an article or discuss it on a discussion forum or in a chat room. This can deepen the analysis and provide priceless feedback.

The true value of the Internet

The true value of the Internet is not finding out information! It is building relationships with people on the other side of the planet (colleagues, academics, journalists, lobbyists, experts, documentalists, enthusiasts, etc.) and entering virtual communities. 

It is also not using it at all when research is more efficient with other tools such as on-line databases!