The Internet is not a universal catalog or index. The Internet contains numerous catalogs and indexes which must be searched one at at time. Emerging tools offer some promise, but information retrieval remains incomplete and imprecise. The Internet is not regulated, screened, or quality controlled. The Internet is a great mixture of recreational, academic, and commercial sources with no requirement for scholarship.
Sources vary greatly as to quality.
The burden is on the user to sift through everything found and filter out the useless, the inappropriate, and the just plain wrong. Users cannot view information on the Internet with the same confidence with which they can read a peer-reviewed journal or universtiy press monograph. Date of origin, purpose, authority, scope, and audience may not be apparent with information on the Internet. Criteria used to evaluate print information should be used to evaluate information accessed through the Internet. Computers are mistakenly perceived to be their own authority and what they offer is too often not questioned.