The widespread shift to electronic formats for information resources has
enabled academic librarians to provide users with an ever-increasing
scope and breadth of quality information. Users who choose to conduct
research independently online encounter not only vetted, proprietary
resources, but also freely available information from resources of
varying credibility. The rapid expansion of the Internet as a means to
both access and share information has been both a boon and a curse for
academic librarians; while users often find the presentation of
information on many free sites to be more navigable than the field
searching and thesauri presented by proprietary databases, the content
may not be subject to the scrutiny applied to their edited or
peer-reviewed counterparts.