Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Does the article, book, news program, Internet site, etc. provide any of the above infor
mation to you? If not . . .
why not?
found on the Web?
With the millions of Web pages available, search engines typi
cally find a remarkable number of documents related to subjects we
request. This can easily suggest that the Web does indeed have in
formation on anything we might want to know about; however, in
practice, the Web does not always have the information we are
seeking, whereas published sources might.
The Web cannot provide needed information when:
The materials you want were published in written sources
years ago, but the printed sources have not been converted
for viewing on the Web.
The materials have been published recently and will soon be
on the Web, but have not yet been uploaded.
The information appears in copyrighted materials that are
available for sale only. The publisher or owner has decided
not to post the information on the World Wide Web, because
that would undermine their revenue from sales.
Materials are available temporarily on the Web, but access is
withdrawn after an interval of time elapses.
Many historical sources have never been converted to a format
appropriate for display on the Web. As a specific example, in re
searching materials related to biology, you might come across ref
erences suggesting a link between Israil' Iosifovich Agol and
stepallelism. A current search of Web materials would find men
tion of Agol in references, but there is little indication about what
he actually did. Consulting the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
,
a standard written source, clarifies that Agol and a group of other
relatively young Soviet biologists came up with “a theory of gene
structure known as stepallelism” that led to Agol gaining an inter
