What's lost?

I finally read an article I've been meaning to get around to for months. I'd hoped it would lead me deeper in my interest about the differences between experiencing research as the physical process of moving through a library and the visual process of scanning computer screens and following links. Perhaps the intellectual process is the same whether the research is done physically or visually, but maybe it's not.

This article I read was only about the way that layouts can be broken up in databases and typographical context can be lost. I'm interested, instead, in research about other information tasks that were physical and are now visual, like medical record keeping, and what might be lost after the transition. There are cues inherent in the physical embodiment of information that have not been made part of its visual representation in electronic formats. Is it harder, as I believe it is, to learn a research process that requires searchers to be aware of the types of sources they're using now that everything's flattened? How do we teach students that there are limits to the information they'll get from the websites they're most likely to find when we can only point to an electronic article or book that looks exactly the same and that they won't be able to distinguish until they actually read it? And when they read it (the article or the book) it's so much harder to process and understand than their usual websites that they give up and don't have a framework to understand what they've missed the way a framework gave context and cues to students in the past when books were separated from journals were separated from pamphlets were separated from magazines were separated from newspapers.

When you had to walk to your next source and hold it in your hands, it was hard to ignore the differences and, perhaps, easier to internalize a hierarchy of information that would make it easier to make decisions about where to go at each stage in the research process. And also how to find our way out of a maze of information if we kept chasing citations. Links from links may mimic the way our minds work but they don't do anything to help us get our thoughts more organized and our natural inclinations in check so that our reasoning on a subject can develop deliberately. The artificial distinctions were a ladder into and out of a subject so that we didn't have to find all of our own toe holds. Can we build something back in to give this guidance? Or, and this seems more likely, has this element of college research faded for good? If it's faded, what do students need from us now?

Here's an article I might track down:

"Full-Text Database Dependency: An Emerging Trend Among Undergraduate Library Users?" by McDonald and Dunkelberger in Research Strategies 16.4 (1998): 301-307.