November 30, 2004
Internet Librarian - Research Tools: Turning Search into Research
Just so you know, the Internet Librarian PowerPoints have started to appear on the InfoToday site. If I spot presentations for any of the programs I've covered, (I haven't yet), I'll go back and link to them.
It's time to start winding up my coverage of Internet Librarian 2004. We're almost there! But I can't fail to mention "Research Tools: Turning Search into Research." Speakers Marydee Ojala, Darlene Fichter and Sebastian Gard discussed a variety of different tools available to help you manage all that useful information you find out there on the web. Just a few tidbits.....
"Post-processing" tools that will help you store, organize and present your research are very popular right now. Among the software discussed by Marydee Ojala was:
Onfolio
AskSam's Surfsaver
Catchtheweb
ContentSaver
HTTrack
Keepoint
Netsnippets
Darlene covered "social bookmarking" web tools such as:
FURL
Frassle
Del.icio.us
Spurl
These sites help you organize your bookmarks by category, search them, and also view sites saved by others with similar interests. Because they're web based, you can access your saved bookmarks from any computer. FURL has been my particular favorite of late, and probably deserves a more detailed entry at some future date.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)November 20, 2004
Internet Librarian - Art of Detection
There's no question, the Internet is becoming a scary place. Between phishing, viruses and spyware, it's enough to make you want to turn off your computer and hide under the covers. Even experienced users can be fooled as scam artists become more sophisticated. But don't panic, Genie Tyburski offered hints on how to avoid scams and bad information in her program, "The Art of Detection."
Phishing is the latest scam, and incidents have been proliferating. According to Genie, phishing scams have a 3% success rate, so don't expect it will stop anytime soon.
The scam artists have technology of their side. They can:
- Spoof the origin of an email
- Disguise the destination address
- Copy the look and feel of a Web site
- Control your browser
I consider myself fairly well informed on such matters, but hadn't seen some of these techniques in action. The URL in your browser can actually be covered with an image file, making it appear that you are at a valid site when you're not. (Check for the telltale smudge to the left of the URL.) And I was shocked to see how cross-site scripting can pop a window up over a valid web site, such as ones provided by financial institutions, asking the user to fill in financial information. The tip off on the later is that you aren't yet logged in, so the site can't know who you are at this point, an indication that you SHOULDN'T provide any private information.
Since phishing has become harder to detect, you must change unsafe habits. Set email to display in text format, and don't follow links from an email. Make sure to confirm web page security by checking for the lock on the bottom right of your browser window whenever you are entering any kind of financial information including credit card numbers. Double-click on the lock to check the security certificate.
Always surf with awareness and assess the information and web sites that you frequent.
In an emergency, if you're on the Internet and think you're in trouble, pull the cable. That's likely fast than trying to turn off your computer.
For more information on spyware, see SpyWareGuide.com.
There's much more and as soon as Genie's PowerPoint is up, I'll link it so you can review the entire presentation. In the meantime, be careful out there.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)November 18, 2004
Internet Librarian - Usability Research Update
I'm back from Internet Librarian, and it's time for catch-up. I still have several sessions to tell you about. The conference was excellent...now I just need to get the CD so I can listen to all the stuff I missed! Monterey was much warmer this year than usual and the rain threatened by weather.com last week certainly never materialized. My raincoat and all those warm jackets I brought along just took up space.
Back to the program. Usability seems to be somewhat of a moving target. Are we gradually learning more about how people use the web, or are people using the web differently as they become more experienced? I don't know the answer to that one, but Darlene Fichter gave us a great update on the current thinking on usability.
There are three elements that make up usability; ease of use, ease of learning and fitness for purpose. The most usable sites tend to be the ordinary ones. If you're striving for usability, go with the ordinary and follow conventions. The site should work in a way that users would expect it to, with no surprises.
Darlene recommended Eric Schaffer's new book, the Institutionalization of Usability:
Another usability resource is the recent Poynter Eyetrack study. Though they studied news sites in particular, some interesting implications for web sites in general were also uncovered. Among the results:
- Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior.
- Large type promotes scanning.
- If a headline is the same size as the blurb, and is bold and positioned on the same line as the text, it's more likely to be read.
- The center of the page is crucial.
Among other tips were:
- Animation captures attention but doesn't increase recall.
- Users checked the right navigation menu more often and ignored the top of the page where banner ads typically appear.
Another interesting question is how users evaluate the credibility of a web site. It turns out that they don't evaluate credibility by checking a site's author or credentials, but instead tend to base it on the professional look of the site.
What about navigation? We might have guessed that deep sites are more difficult to navigate than shallow ones, but nonetheless, the "3 click rule" that states that users won't click more than 3 times to get to the information they're seeking is a myth.
Though the intent is likely not to slow down users, in fact, expandable menus are slower to navigate. Vertical menus are preferred.
Another myth is that users won't scroll. According to Darlene, you can place links and text below the fold as long as the page doesn't look like it stops. You can make it obvious that there's more information on the page by making sure not to have every column end at the same place.
Jargon is always a usability pitfall. Librarians may want to refer to "Library Terms That Users Understand" to get ideas on how to use terms that will be clear to the user.
Make sure not to make your pages a "wall of text", which can be intimidating, boring and painful for users. People will skip straight text. For readability include bullet points and white space.
And this was just the stuff I was able to get down on my notepad! Darlene really covered ground.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)November 17, 2004
Internet Librarian - AIIP Awards
The AIIP Technology Awards were announced at Tuesday's Keynote....the envelope please......and it goes to Netsnippets! Netsnippets is a product designed for organizing, compiling and presentation of web research.
Runner ups were Dialog 4 and Microsoft's Onenote. By the way, Onenote has very recently become one of my favorite programs.
The speaker for the keynote presentation, Patricia Martin, was amazing. Her topic, essentially advice to nonprofit libraries on how to find and manage sponsorship opportunities was pretty much irrelevant to my interests, but I found it fascinating nonetheless.
She had several book recommendations, one of which, Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology, sounded like it had some interesting insight into the tech guy psyche. And after all, wouldn't we all like to better understand the tech guys in our lives?
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)November 16, 2004
Internet Librarian: Web-Based Current Awareness
As the number of newsletters available via email grows I hope that we will start to see more tools for managing them. Subscribers have to be added and removed, usage needs to be monitored (is there anybody subscribing to this anymore?) and the issues need to be sent out to everyone on the list as soon as they are received. For whatever reason the serials software used by libraries to check in and route materials seems to be lacking in any tools for email list management.
In addition to the standard newsletter-type current awareness materials, customized email alerts are also are proliferating. Think Westclips and Lexis Eclipses, for example. In this morning's program (Internet Librarian 2004), A Web-Based Current Awareness Management System, Michael Rogers and Mary Talmadge-Breebenar (Bristol-Myers Squibb) showed the in-house system they developed to manage all of the various email alerts that are set up for their users.
Their system centralizes the email distribution and archiving of custom alerts so that duplication is reduced and money saved. Users are notified of new alerts and can opt to subscribe. Their users can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to the emails via a web page, and are notified of new alerts that may be of interest. The software can monitor the usage of the alerts to help the librarians determine which ones should be cancelled and can even automatically unsubscribe a user if they haven't accessed at least one of the past 20 alerts they've received. Anyone can see who is on the routing list for a particular alert.
They assign both categories and topics to each alert, with categories being more general (17 total) and topics more specific (170 total). The user can view the archive for a particular alert before subscribing, and can fill out a web form to request that a new alert be created.
Now, here's a business opportunity if I ever saw one. Rather than all of us trying to coerce our tech departments to build this kind of thing from scratch, how about some enterprising individual developing such a tool to sell to those of us who need it!
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)Internet Librarian: Library Site Meets About.com
Does it make sense to maintain lists of generic web links when that information is available on the web from other sources? David King at Kansas Public Library started re-thinking the time and energy the library staff devoted to their lists of links, and at the same time wondered what they COULD do to better serve their patrons. While this case study centered on a public library environment, the questions and solutions are quite pertinent to all kind of libraries.
First things first. They had over 2,700 links, most of them to web resources. They learned from their statistics that the most popular links were to local web sites and library subscription databases. About 2,200 of their links were hit only 11-49 times per month. So they concluded that most links were't being used, and the local information was what their users were really after.
Where to go from there? They decided to abandon their lists of links and instead create guide-like topic pages in a similar way that "about.com" pulls together information on a topic, providing content by incorporating their own blogs and articles, links to library materials pulled from the catalog, focused web links, reader's advisories, local programs, and news. They also offer RSS feeds for each topic page.
The resulting pages are very portal like in the way a variety of information is displayed on one page. See their Harry Potter page for a good example.
It's easy to see how this model could be used in public, special and academic libraries to compile information on any topic. But perhaps the most important lesson is that we need to consider the cost-benefit of the services we provide so that we direct our efforts to services that are most important to our users.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)November 15, 2004
Live From Internet Librarian
It's not very often that you can go to a conference, attend 4 programs in a row, and find them all informative and well-done. But that was my first day at Internet Librarian in Monterey. Yes, I know, I should tell you all about it, but sorry, I'm just too tired. The best I can do for now is to give you a few good alternatives for an IL fix and promise more later.
There are other bloggers, hardier souls than I, that are diligently taking notes and logging pithy quotes from the speakers. Watch Steven Cohen's Library Stuff for running commentary. He included some of the pertinent statistics from the keynote this morning, a very interesting presentation by Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Pew is studying who is doing what on the Internet, and it's not always what you might think. For example, Rainie claims that people aren't complaining about information overload. They actually feel more in control because of the web rather than being overwhelmed. That's got to be good news.
There are several bloggers at IL 2004. If you want to track their Internet Librarian entries, check this link from Feedster on a regular basis. (Again, via Library Stuff.)
By the way, according to Tom Hogan, president and CEO of ITI, attendance is up 20% over last year. Let's hope that's a good economic indicator. Conference attendance in general has definitely been in the doldrums for that past few years.
I'll have to fill you in later...time for bed. There's a full schedule tomorrow, including the blogging track, and I'm going to need my rest!
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
