Librarian Navel Gazing

I've been musing about this for weeks.

When we are teaching library patrons about evaluating the information that they find on the Internet, I always use the example of health information. You should find an author that you trust on a health topic, instead of depending on the information put on the web by "Bill in his basement who said 'I put toothpaste on the wart for 14 days and it went away!'", or information from websites that want to sell you a charlatanesque cure-all.

But, think about this for a minute. What if 1,000 people or 5,000 people say on their individual websites/blogs that putting toothpaste on a wart made it go away? At what point is there a critical mass of individual reports that makes this sort of health information on the Internet valid? Medical professionals have strong medical training and access to medical knowledge resources, but they still base their diagnosis to great extent on what the patient tells them is wrong or what hurts.

There is no quantifiable way that I know of to test my toothpaste-wart theory, but it makes for good pondering as I walk to work in the mornings. Of course, news alerts might be an interesting way to get a loose sense of something like this, if I can get a topic that is focused enough.

My colleague and I are going to prepare a public computer class for the Fall on 'News Aggregators and News Alerts', and she was thinking of setting up a news alert for 'Sasquatch' (a.k.a. Bigfoot). I think this news alert would be so much fun.