A Quote

I tend to hate quotes. I also tend to hate negative words like “hate”, but really I think I don’t like reading quotes because every quote I stumble across online is about men & how you don’t need them or some kind of optimism encouraging thing. I love optimism, I encourage it, but I don’t think it needs to be sugary sweet. I feel like my optimism isn’t that flowery. I believe that everything will work out just fine, even if things initially seem to be going terribly, part of that is because I am a little bit superstitious & feel the universe is my friend. Mostly, I believe everything will work out just fine because I will make it that way & refuse to live a life that is anything short of amazing!

At any rate, I didn’t intend to write about quotes, I wanted to share one that I came across while doing some research for my midterm papers (note: it has nothing to do with men or optimism):

“This fast food approach to information consumption drives librarians crazy. “Our information is healthier and tastes better too” they shout. But nobody listens. We’re too busy Googling.” ~ Peter Morville

I have been spending so much time thinking about information lately & I wonder at what point do people decide that the information they have is good enough even if it isn’t the best? I am torn between loving & hating the internet because the internet allows us to search so many different resources, but it also makes us kind of lazy.

Personally, I feel that Googling works just fine when I want to know something trivial & I want to know it quickly. For example, I just saw an adorable picture of bunnies & thought, “I want a bunny! No, they poop too much. Why do bunnies poop so much?”. So I went to Google, typed, “Why do bunnies poop so much?” & basically discovered common sense things.  Tiny animals = short digestive tract, high metabolism, who cares that’s how it is. Question answered.

However, if for whatever reason, I were really trying to thoroughly study why bunnies poop so much, I wouldn’t go to Google. But here is the sad part (shame on me), I would definitely first check the academic databases for online resources. I would search carefully, use every synonym I could think of & phrase it with Boolean logic. Once I’d exhausted those resources I would check for actual books because honestly, a lot of the time I’m like, “Uhhhhh where am I going to find the time to walk to school & then go to the library & that particular library is all the way in north campus (because sometimes my thoughts are incessantly whiny) & then I have to snoop around & check it out & bring it back, blerghghghg”. Not to mention that working in libraries for so long kind of makes me feel like I don’t want to be there on my days off the same way most people get tired of shopping at a store they work in.

Part of this is because during my undergrad days, our campus library was not really functional since it was under construction. We would request books online, have them brought over, & just picked them up at a desk like magic. No trying to reach impossibly high shelves or trying to remember when the library is actually open. I have somehow trained myself to think that online resources are good enough. That is bad. I am a library student & feel incredibly guilty about honestly just being to lazy to go to the library sometimes.

I”m sorry to go on some random library tangent, but am so curious! Is Google’s information good enough for you? Online information in general? Is it that you feel your question has been fully answered as best as it can or is it that an extension of research is a bit more work than you’d like to put in?

I guess my answer would be a little bit of both. Regardless, next time I need to research something less frivolous than bunny poop, I am putting on my walking shoes & heading to the library.