High school students, Google, and the Wild West

“That there is a crisis in scholarly publishing, few would disagree. But what exactly is the nature of the crisis? For academic librarians it is, among other things, the skyrocketing costs and growing number of many of the must–have journals; or perhaps it is the so–called serial breakdown, which describes a practice by which students turn to Google and the open Web for all their research, neglecting the high–value (and often expensive) publications, mostly serials, that libraries have licensed.”

--from “The Devil You Don’t Know” by Joseph J. Esposito

To this list I might add online databases that are subscribed to by school libraries (such as encyclopedias) that are rarely used by students.

As someone more familiar with high school libraries than a university academic library, I am not so familiar with the reality of the growing costs for must-have journals—though I imagine the numbers are likely astonishing.

However, I am someone who is very familiar with the “so-called serial breakdown” at the high school level: the internet as it is now (and particularly as it was a few years ago) is sometimes compared to the Wild West—a world of “anything goes” governed by few laws…where the wildest and the strongest often rule, and the wisest are left in the shadows. One of the features of the Wild West is that it presents a certain allure; though we have grown accustomed to and fond of our lives today that are defined by social rules, even as adults, we also can’t help but wondering what it might feel like to rob a bank and ride off into the sunset with the loot. Enter into this digital Wild West teenagers, who dive into the world of the web (read: Google) ready to read, believe, copy and paste, and report on the wildest of web information discovered in this digital world.

Though I don’t know exactly whose “fault” it is, or what is to blame, but high-value (and yes, often expensive) publications—whether online or not—are not only not used by my students, but not even known of by the vast majority of them. And the truth is I am not even looking for who or what to blame; what I am looking for is a solution. As a teacher, I do have opportunities to introduce students to my school’s package of high-quality library resources, though I find that I rarely do that. Our teacher-librarian, of course, has more opportunities for such direct instruction, but she is a very busy person as well.

While I don’t want to keep my students out of the Wild West just for the sake of keeping them out of the Wild West, I do want them to be aware of quality: what is quality, and what is not. Throughout this course, a common, recurring topic has been the importance of students having such skills. With ever-greater amounts of easily- and freely-accessible information (that is only growing all the time), it is painfully clear that my students—and most all high school age students, I think—desperately and literally need such skills. Imagine waltzing through the Wild West and not being able to differentiate between the bank robber and the bar tender: “No sir, I didn’t want THAT kind of shot.” That kind of mistake could be fatal. While attributing the novel Of Mice and Men to a certain Mr. Cliff Notes is not quite as serious a crime, in the realm of the high school English teacher, it is nearly as dangerous.