But recently it is the World Wide Web that is having the greatest impact on reference and instruction at this library, and it is about this method of accessing the Internet that we will concentrate our impressions in this article. The democratic base and distribution of information on the Web is both energizing and enervating. Questions of content become almost secondary at first as we are dazzled by the possibilities. The popularity of the Web has probably increased that expectation sharply in the last year. But the Web is not quite ready for prime time.
Sites often load slowly or are inaccessible from one moment to the next.
They may be unreliable, making a splashy debut but lying unmaintained after that. Many disappear without a trace. It can also take enormous amounts of time to find little of substance. In addition, printing capabilities vary with the local situation. In our library, we provide Web access, but our dot matrix printers cannot support the images.