October 11, 2022
The Internet can be really intimidating. There’s a wealth of excellent information online that can enrich our lives, but there are also conspiracy theories, disinformation, and charlatans. This isn’t that much different than the time before the Internet. I remember receiving, and sending, chain letters via snail mail. I remember reading about conspiracy theories in books. And charlatanism certainly predates any kind of telecommunications technology, let alone the Internet. However, it is most certainly easier for scammers and grifters to reach more targets via email or social media, than hawking their wares via horse and buggy in the town square or taking out ads on the back pages of newspapers.
It helps to remember that the Internet as we understand it, is relatively new. In a way, we’re only at a similar stage with the Internet now as we would have been with the rise of radio in the 1940s in terms of uptake. While Internet skills can vary as much within generations as between them, there are generational differences in how we’ve experienced the meteoric growth of the Internet. For Gen Z, Millennials and many GenX’ers, the Internet has been around for longer in our lives than not, while the Baby Boomers would have experienced the seismic shifts the Internet brought well into their adulthood.
The World Wide Web, what we often think of when we talk about the Internet, was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (CERN is the European Council for Nuclear Research (in French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). He brought together a number of technologies that were being developed to create a system that allowed users to search for information located on computer networks and view it in a way that hadn’t been possible before including the ability to display sound, pictures, and click on links. In 1993, CERN declared that the technology developed at CERN for the World Wide Web would be freely usable by anyone. This has formed the bedrock of how we view the Internet—as a digital commons where everyone can participate.
According to Ian Peter’s History of the Internet, by 1992 the Internet only had around 26 sites. By 1998, there were 750,000 commercial sites on the World Wide Web. Today, there are (an estimated) nearly 2 billion websites indexed online—and that’s just what search engines can see. Beneath that, there are all manner of things search engines can’t see. This so-called “Deep Web” includes any data that isn’t available to a search engine but is still stored and accessed online. Things such as public library catalogue search results, private databases, pay for use websites, data housed on file hosting services, and encrypted sensitive data like your banking information.
So, the Internet is huge. Not only huge from a “how much stuff” perspective, but also in the many ways that it touches our lives. From paying for your groceries to mindlessly scrolling TikTok, the Internet is just as much a staple of our modern lives as the telephone or electricity.
So how do we empower ourselves to participate in a digital society and avoid the very real pitfalls of life online? How do we find what information is good on the Internet, and avoid being duped by people who want to take advantage of us?
In a previous County Life article, Combatting Misinformation (October 8, 2020), I wrote about how to critically evaluate information on the Internet. But I also wrote about how hard that can be to do—even for me, and I went to school for this stuff. It’s still an important thing to do, but sometimes it’s nice to have a shortcut. And one really good shortcut is to use your public library as a guide.
On the Haliburton County Public Library website, we have what we call our Digital Library. On this page there are currently 58 entries that include our database subscriptions, and what we like to think of as the “Best of the Web.” These websites are ones that library staff rely on in their day-to-day lives that we think will be useful to you too. You can find all sorts of useful things like online newspapers and magazines, government resources, entertainment, health information, and more all from vetted sources.
Search engines like Google use web crawling robots to index websites and an algorithm to generate your search results—ostensibly based on your previous web viewing habits. While this means that your search results are almost always up-to-date, it also means that there’s no personal experience or critical thought going into the quality of those search results. There’s not the friendly helper giving you a much needed hand.
Human curated lists of websites are not a new idea. Web directories, web rings, and other specialty collections of websites have been around since the early 1990s. While something like our Digital Library page will never have the breadth and reach of a search engine like Google, what we lack in quantity we make up for in quality.
Letting your public library be your friendly neighbourhood Internet guide means that you’re not alone when looking for information online—you’re getting help from all the people you trust at HCPL when you click a link on our Digital Library page. We’re always adding to our Digital Library, so if you don’t see something there you would like to, just let us know and we’ll evaluate your suggestion. By working together, we can make life on the Internet a little less intimidating, and a lot more useful for everyone.
By Erin Kernohan-Berning, Technology + Systems Coordinator