Our World of Information:

Librarian: We live in the information age with hundreds of billions of webpages, an estimated 122,347 libraries of all kinds in the United States alone and an estimated production of 122,108 books in hard cover and paper back in the year 2000 alone.

There's basically two types of information out on the internet: there's the freely available information and there's the for pay information or the fee based information. Why does it matter to understand the difference between the two? Well, basically, you get what you pay for.

Here's an example of John Smith's web page. This person doesn't seem to be affiliated with any institution or professional organization. It looks like they have proclaimed themselves an expert here but that may not actually be the case.

Here's another example of a free source but we are able to verify the author. This is a government web site developed by the U.S. Census Bureau and is a perfectly acceptable source to use in an academic paper.

Now here is an example of a for-pay service. For a monthly fee of $19.95 you are promised access to the world's largest on-line library.

There shouldn't be any reason why you should have to subscribe to companies like this. Let me show you why.

You may recognize the names of some of these databases Sirs Discover, Ebsco Host, Proquest. These are all databases that your school or public libraries have subscribed to on your behalf. They are databases that live on the web, but they are not freely available to everyone.

If you go to a college or university in the State of Ohio, you'll belong to something called Ohiolink. What this is is a statewide cooperative where you can borrow books from over 70 different libraries and you'll have access to over 100 different research databases.

This is one of the databases that is common to all Ohiolink member schools. This is Academic Search Premier, a database used in the public and school libraries as well.

Just to summarize, you really should be using something other than just the free-web sources for your academic exercises. Be sure to ask your reference librarian where the library article databases are found on your campus. Again, the library article databases don't rely only on the free internet.

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