When my telecommunications professor told our class it may be assigned to go without computers and cell phones for 48 hours, there certainly weren't cheers.

Today's world has become what my class's textbook, Media Now, calls an "Information Society," where jobs in computer- and Internet-related companies are predicted to grow 20 percent in the next decade and laborious jobs will be shipped overseas.

Basically the message behind this development is to get on board or thrown over it, and it also seems an increasing number of professors are adopting the philosophy of teaching students how to locate their own information instead of memorizing straight dates and facts.

This policy takes the form of open-note tests, online exams and even entirely online classes. It's become so prevalent it would be difficult to complete a degree at a large university like Penn State without encountering this concept.

The curriculum has morphed to have a more electronic focus, so what has become of regular old-fashioned book learning?

It may be an overstated fact, tucked far back in the mind, but no Google search is going to provide the amount of potent knowledge the library will.

Life is not like Jeopardy in the sense that most adults will not be given 10 seconds to answer a random question worth $2,000. They might, however, be given a a task to complete that requires them to collect the best information they can.

This form of gathering isn't a new technique, but the future students are preparing for will require creating the most comprehensive collection of ideas.

So where can students fin all of the information they're expected to self-organize? There are default engines like Google.com and Wikipedia.com, but it is rare a professor speaks highly of these as scholarly research places. Plus, putting faith in only these sites

would definitely be taking a voluntary plunge overboard.

However, if it's necessary to use them, Foster Communications librarian Debora Cheney gave several smart searching tips to return the best results.

First, she said, use quotes for exact phrases and key words. Otherwise, utilize nouns and leave out "garbage words" such as "of" and "or" because engines like Google will return any page that matches the words in the search box.

"You want a balance between precise results ... and a good amount of recall," Cheney said.

A more legitimate option would be to visit one of the campus libraries or access the Web site at libraries.psu.edu.

There are thousands of databases and journals subscribed to by the Penn State Library System, and with such specific databases like PILOTS (Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress), there shouldn't be any excuse for not being able to find very specialized details about a topic.

And though the stacks may be frightening because of their sheer size or complexity, according to the library's Web site, about 600 employees can help students locate which-

ever of the more than five million volumes they desire to find.

In this group there are also "liaison librarians" for each Penn State major and minor, said Arts and Humanities head librarian Dan Mack. He said using the library's resources for class assignments is a great alternative to the habitual Wikipedia search.

"Do you want your grandma's hip replacement surgery performed by someone who was trained off of Google?" Mack said, exemplifying the kind of specificity the library's resources are meant for.

While few students may use the databases for this purpose, the texts available through the library are "created by experts in the field" and not accessible by normal search engines, Mack said.

The card catalogue is out-dated and the building sure isn't going to start shrinking, but the quantity of wisdom found on the millions of pages, both literal and digital, is unmatched by any search engine on the Internet.