Where the problem was once a dearth of information, it is now an overabundance of information. Now it is necessary for students and faculty to spend significant amounts of time evaluating the quality of the information they find. VIVA offers a trusted source of quality information on the Internet to college students and faculty in Virginia. The online collections offered by VIVA pass through a quality control process that does not apply in most search engines. Think of a search on the Internet in terms of signal to noise ratios.
Good information is signal and the rest is noise.
For college students and faculty, a search in a VIVA collection is likely to yield a much better signal to noise ratio than a search in a big search engine. Vol 52, no. Perhaps even more disturbing is the relative instability of the web pages that students cited. Within a year or two a large portion of cited web pages were no longer available. VIVA offers the speed and convenience of the Internet combined with the authoritative content and stability of scholarly publications.