Such Stuff as Footnotes Are Made On

Interesting debate

You and Questia should not be arguing. As a teacher at a private high school who uses Questia, and a Shakespeare fanatic, I hate to see two groups who should be in support of each other exchanging barbs. To criticize Questia for not having everything is like criticizing any library for not having everything: you can, but unless you are at the Library of Congress or the Bodleian you really do not have a point. Questia adds things every day; I would compare it at this point to a mid-sized college library. For my students, who would otherwise be using a 20,000 volume collection, it is a godsend. The trouble I have with other teachers is that they think Questia is the Internet, which it is not. It is a LIBRARY; with books and journal articles. The difference is that you can search for a word in EVERY BOOK at the same time. If you search for Shakespeare, you get 31,052 sources that mention the name. If you search withing those results for, say, “blood” you get 18,997 times “blood” is used in books that mention Shakespeare. I am being simple, because finding what you want is different from paper searches, but the tool is phenomenal. We just had Nigel Wood, who has written a number of books including being general editor of the Theory in Practice series, here to lecture on Twelfth Night, which we were doing. I showed him Questia, and he was pleased with how OFTEN references to his work appeared. He could search his name and read a number of references to his work by other authors that he had never seen before.You guys are on the same side. Questia has to pay for rights like anyone else, and automatically credits authors. Everyone needs to lose preconceptions and figure out how to value intellectual property in the ever-more digital future.

Tom Keelan, Miami Country Day School, at 12:30 pm EDT on April 6, 2006

One archiving effort

As I’m sure you’re aware, http://archive.org is one attempt to archive a fraction of the web.

Mark Crane, One archiving attempt at Utah Valley State College, at 6:26 pm EDT on April 25, 2005

Reponse to Mark Crane and Mr. Peabody

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. We have looked into both archiving methods, essentially snapshots of the Web; they cannot counteract the several ways footnotes deteriotate. Sometimes technicians whose truth is server space reformat footnotes. Sometimes companies whose truth is profit archive them for a fee. Sometimes datafeeds into libraries insert spaces where none should exist in a footnote, generating the “20%” computer symbols. Sometimes new content is added at the same URL. Sometimes Web pages come down. Sometimes domain names are transferred. And so forth and so forth. I can list several more reasons why footnotes lapse, but the moral is, Internet archiving as we now know it cannot preserve footnotes as if they were printed on paper in the firewalled medium of the book, upon which our scientific method relies. Thus, the thrust of our work, which may be a life’s work (or half-life’s work, as I will turn the project over to Dr. Dimitrova at some point)is a new methodology for the Web that takes into account its dynamic features. We don’t know if this is a possibility; at present, every thing from convenience study to intercoder reliability is at stake. (Personally, I doubt that we can devise a methodology that works unless it is backed up by paper, which is why I print out my URLs.) My own thesis is that the new dominant medium of Internet is too commercially based and dynamic for serious scholarship, and libraries have bought into technology in such a big way, that many librarians view their jobs now as dissemination managers for data rather than gatekeepers for fact. In an ideal world with proper funding, libraries would continue to buy print and subscribe to databases and digital journals. However, as most scholars want quick access to data—which the Internet readily supplies (and then corrodes)—I think one day we’re headed for the world that I describe in my whimsical essay in Inside Higher Ed.

Michael Bugeja, Director at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, at 7:43 am EDT on April 28, 2005

Errors on the Internet

The Internet certainly increases the likelihood of errors being replicated. And, as we all know, while we may discount something read in one place, it is more difficult to do so if one sees the same information in, say, five or six places. Indeed, at that point, people generally accept it as fact. Anyone who has spent much time searching online genealogies can quickly attest to the fact that errors posted in one genealogy are quickly picked up and reposted in many others due to the prevalence of the GEDCOM format for importing another genealogy into one’s own. Find one common ancestor and you can instantly import all of the other common ancestors. Now, if one takes the time to painstakingly vet and verify the information in the imported file, then the process is wonderful. For amateur genealogists, however, importing multiple files and the reposting the final product appears to be disturbingly common.

At the same time, pockets of order and discipline already exist on the Internet. In the world of digital libraries, I am especially confident that accuracy will ultimately prevail. Unlike genealogies, where people are citing resources such as family bibles and other sources not generally available, many copies exist of most of the content in today’s libraries (16th century Shakespeare texts excepted).

As the world’s leading Internet-based, online academic library, Questia has scanned and digitized the full-text of over 56,000 previously published books and nearly one million articles. While we have undoubtedly introduced some errors along the way, I believe they will be corrected over time. What is more worrisome is that many students will use whatever they can find on the Internet for free rather than the academically vetted, peer-reviewed content available through Questia.

For centuries, students doing research have used materials that have gone through two filters before they use it: 1) the editorial process or peer review and 2) the collection development process of their college/public library. Before something is published, it must get past an editor. Then before it makes its way into the brick-and-mortar library, a collection development librarian has to decide it’s worthwhile to purchase and put on the shelf.

While I am a fan of blogs, they and much of the rest of the content on the Internet have not gone through either the editorial or collection development filters or any other filter for that matter. As a result, the content is not reliable or credible for research. In contrast, Questia replicates these filters on the Internet by providing online researchers with the same high-quality content that is in the traditional library: we have agreements with over 250 leading academic publishers to include their books journals, but we only license what our team of collection development librarians select. At its core, we provide a collection not simply a listing of individual books.

Although errors may be introduced in the process (we steadfastly attempt to avoid them and go so far as to maintain the original pagination and even line breaks of the books), the greatest error is having students use and cite unvetted content that lacks credibility as if it were the same as the content that is in the traditional library. Much like how the advent of the word processor vanquished the typewriter, the dawn of Internet search has surmounted the physical trip to the library. As educators, policy makers and thinking citizens, however, we must recognize that our society has a vital interest in bringing the high quality content that is available in our libraries online and making sure that students and researchers can tell the difference between something that has gone through the editorial process and been published from something that has not. At Questia, we are hard at work at just such a goal.

Troy Williams, President & CEO at Questia Media, Inc., at 5:00 pm EDT on April 29, 2005