Have you ever experienced getting lost in the
shelves of books or have yourself buried in the dozens of pages of reference
books through days and nights searching for relevant materials for assignments?
Otherwise, are you the one that experience more frequent of surfing the web
blindly or end yourself in a confused state, holding multiple sources of supporting
materials and busy evaluating which to be use? Conducting research is a task
that is closely associated with a student’s life, regardless of which course
you are pursuing and almost every single moment, new academic or research
papers are produced and published. Have you ever read any academic papers and
wondered where on earth that the authors are able to obtain such concrete
evidences, examples or convincing information that are able to persuade you to
trust the results of the studies conducted? Undeniably, a credible research
stems from and is backed up by credible sources of information and at the stage
of being a college or university student, the two most common sites to obtain
resources for research projects are the physical library and virtual world of
internet. Now, let us evaluate both the pros and cons of each source.
From
a more physical and surface aspect, the cost-concern and environmental factors play
a major role in determining the types of source a student would choose to find
information from. As we have come to understand, library is the traditional
place to conduct research for an academic work, whereby it contain a large
collection of books, periodicals and printed journals, that provide the
students with the opportunity to read hardcopies of the reference materials
instead of being extensively exposed to harmful radiation while researching
online, which may destroy the eyesight and cause dyspepsia. However, what if
you are bound by the operation hour of the library but you need to bring home some
information in certain books or journals, which you cannot borrow or can borrow
only for few hours, for further research? Then, you would
need to make a copy of those pages with the photocopy machine in the library where
you require information from, which can be extremely costly sometimes as you
need to secure information from not only one books or single pages but multiple
sources in the library. In contrast to that, internet will be a better choice
in this context because internet provides you to surf through millions of
webpages and you can simply bookmarks the pages of information that you feel to
be needed and even highlight the important points in the documents or files
downloaded from internet. Also, in view of the environmental-concern issues,
we, students are taught to be more environmental friendly and conserving paper
by limiting printing or photocopying is one of the essential ways.
Next,
the easiness and efficiency of accessing and obtaining the desired information
is a factor to be considered as well. Students’ life is bombarded with multiple
assignments at a time and the time factor judged by how quickly and effortlessly
the desired or targeted information can be found will greatly affect a student’s
choice of the sources of information they long to use. In view of the source of
library, knowledgeable and friendly librarians are available to assist with
locating information in person, chat, e-mail or telephone. A student can request
assistance at the beginning of your research and spare valuable time spent on
the Internet, being confused by too much information depicted simply by typing
a key word. We even have things called “OPAC” in either school or public
libraries where students can easily locate the books they wish to find through
the library own digital computation system. Unfortunately, the downside of
library is that most of the librarian todays are lack of the responsibility and
readiness to lend a helping hand to students in locating the information they
want and the OPAC search engine are not being kept up-to-date to provide
assistance to the students. In contrast to that, internet is a powerful
searching engine in which, just by typing the keywords of topics of research,
one will get uncountable sources of information online. The tools available for
college students online include multiple thesaurus, dictionary, grammar and
study guides, and research databases. E-mail, social networking sites, online forum,
and social media, such as educational video, are also channels available online
which allows students to exchange or discuss opinion and information obtained
simply by sharing the link or copying and pasting the raw data to filter and
obtain the most accurate and relevant information. 
On
reviewing the two factors mentioned above, it is seemed that internet has
appeared to be a more outstanding source of information for students, yet, the
third factor of reliability explains why such wonderful virtual world of supply
of information cannot substitute a physical library. Printed materials are more
credible in the sense that all the authors and publishers of the books or
journal studies are clearly stated and can be cited as strong evidence while
presenting an academic paper. In contrast to that, information
on the internet is hard to tell who’s telling you what and where is the
location of the information. When you use information in your paper from the
Internet, you may appear to find that most of the sources you cited from are
anonymous or unknown of the authors. Though this is allowed in citation and
reference of an academic paper, your work of studies or investigation will
later appear to be less credible or reliable.
The
debate over which method of research is better, either through a physical library
or the virtual Internet remains a negotiable. Some students find it easier to
conduct their research in a library because they can physically search through
a reference source instead of having to search it digitally. Others are more
comfortable working on online materials when they are conducting research since
it is more convenient and environmental friendly. In short, both sources of
information have their pros and cons and cannot be substituted by one another.
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