From Microball, a CC-licensed image by Flickr user SerenityRose.

Mark Bauerlein–the man who recently published The Dumbest Generation (wouldn’t you love to be one of his students?)–has an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming. The good folks at the Chronicle moved the article from beyond the pay wall, no doubt knowing they’d get lots of links from us blog-addled skimmers. (I saw it via a link from Stephen Downes.) It’s always fun to read these anti-web articles in the Chron web edition, isn’t it?

I’m sympathetic to some of what Bauerlein has to say. I think it’s true that reading the average web page on a screen isn’t necessarily good preparation for reading longer, more complicated works. And I worry sometimes as I feel my impatience with reading longer works on- or offline that my attention span has been negatively affected by all my time online.

But there is also much foolishness and Gormanism in this article as well. Here is a plum library-specific example:

Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn’t occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.

Their initiative wasn’t sapped. They just couldn’t understand why an obituary that took them half an hour to retrieve from a microfilm of the New York Times was in any way more valid than the exact same obituary retrieved from the archive of the New York Times online.

I think it’s great to encourage students to talk to librarians, and I even think it’s great to encourage them to use printed journals and microfilm. The fact is there’s still a lot of stuff that’s not online. But newspaper obituaries?

At least at the (admittedly atypical) small, private, expensive liberal arts college where I work, the students seem to crave offline reading of important books. I’m not saying that many of them won’t cut corners when given a chance, and I’m not saying that their first thought when it’s time to do research is to check a reference book and hit the microforms.

But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.

Update: The person who took the “Microball” photo I used to illustrate this post wrote an interesting short blog post in response.