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Its a work in progress, but here it is:
Do you feel information overload. I am constantly trying to catch up with my readings and RSS feeds. Well, a new site (brijit) aims at reducing the amount of information. It uses people, not algorithms or computers, to summarize articles to 100 words or less, and ranks them from avoid to must read. Wired magazine adds “Every day, Brijit publishes around 125 concise summaries of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as audio and video programs”. Check it out.
This post is a website review of the Rebecca Crown Library, Dominican University. I will use Columbia College, Chicago and the North Carolina State University Libraries websites as a comparison.
The first thing I noticed about all three web sites is that none of the links changed colors after visiting a link. This is the number 3 top mistakes in web design. It makes for revisiting a page unintentionally highly like, and that is annoying.
Another common mistake was in regards to text sizing. Only Columbia’s web site allowed the user to adjust text size. And this was surprising. Columbia’s text was the largest of the three to begin with. And while Dominican’s web site had a lot more white space than NCSU (their site tries to cram too much stuff onto the front page) it would be nice if the size was adjustable. This is top mistakes number 5.
On the plus for Dominican, and Columbia, was the use of bread crumbing. This is when clicking through to pages from the homepage, a bar at the top of the screen tells the user where they are in the web sites hierarchy.
Another mistake for Dominican, and not Columbia or NCSU, is a link opening in a new browser. This happens only when clicking on the catalog link, either Dominican’s or CARLI’s. It is very annoying, and I am not sure why its only for the catalog link and not the other links, so besides being annoying, it is not uniform. This is also one of the lessons that top ten web site design mistakes discusses.
The last mistake that I will address for Dominican is the fact that it looks like an advertisement for the school. This is shameful! Neither of the other two web sites that I looked at looked like this. No library web site that I can think of has an apply for the school box or stories from past students in such a prominent position on the page. This is what happens when a marketing department gets their paws on overall web site design.
The last thing that I would like to address is the fact that Dominican Library has two homepages. https://jicsweb1.dom.edu/ics/Library/ and http://www.dom.edu/library/ . They are not at all uniform, and it makes reference work very difficult. Walking someone through a process over the phone can be hard when they are looking at one homepage and you are looking at another.
Is the wisdom of crowds coming to an end? A recent article in Newsweek is indicating that the pull of the wisdom of crowds movement is waining. It says, “In more recent years the ideal of the noble amateur has been bent to include a general disdain for the professional writer, editor or journalist. But while the tide of investment seems to be shifting somewhat, the nature of the Internet suggests that Web 2.0 populism will never be thrown out entirely. “There’s always a Big New Thing, but the old Big New Thing doesn’t really go away,” says Reynolds. “It becomes just another layer—like we’re building an onion from the inside out.” “
Only time will tell. Maybe people are realizing that the democratization is really an affront for pure business. Somebody is making money for all their hard work, it just isn’t them.
Many of my classmates have given wonderful descriptions of the history of the internet. I especially like David’s account. So I decided, and hope that Michael approves, to write about the history of the internet as it relates to libraries. Much of this post will be dervided from the IMLS study “InterConnections“.
The question the IMLS wanted to answer was whether or not the internet was replacing libraries. They stated,
Museums and libraries have long been sources of recreation, learning and information for personal, family, educational and workplace purposes. However, the Internet, Web and other technologies have become an increasingly used source of information that some believe will largely replace their physical counterparts. On the other hand, some have speculated that the Internet and related technologies will actually enhance and increase museum and library use. There is no solid evidence to support either assertion, particularly considering the wide range in types of museums and libraries.
What did they find? They found that Libraries and Museums are the MOST trusted sources of information for the more than 1,700 adults surveyed. They also found that nearly half of information seekers use the internet, libraries and museums. 
The best results of the survey found that
“In 2006 remote online access increased adult visits to museums by 75%
and to public libraries by 73% (while in-person visits have increased over
time).” and that “
Public library in-person visits per capita have increased 26% over the past
13 years.”
How cool is that! The internet has increased both trust in libraries and number of visits. So how does this relate to the history of the internet? Well the report summarizies
The on-line information environment has changed dramatically since the
earliest on-line systems emerged in the early 1960s. Growth has occurred
both in the number of users of on-line information as well as in the number of
on-line information resources and providers. The rate of growth in each of
these areas increased exponentially with the availability of the public Internet
and the World Wide Web. These foundational technological developments
created an environment in which almost anyone can “publish” or function as
an information provider and have virtually instantaneous access to massive
volumes of information.
So the history of the internet is also a history of libraries. The library has moved from the physical building to the “galatic network”. As the internet has gone everywhere so has the library.
This post is all about Open Library. I recently read an article in the Chronicles entitled ”An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant“. It talks about Aaron Swartz – yes the creator of RSS at 14 years old. Now he is an elderly 21. His new endeavor is taking on Worldcat.
This new project, Open Library, allows for users to add and create access points for the books. His rationale is that he saw all these books locked up in the library “but nobody ever found out about them, because they didn’t have a spot on the Web, and people weren’t browsing the stacks anymore.”
The Chronicle describes “The project is similar to WorldCat, which is owned by OCLC, a nonprofit group that promotes technology in libraries. But it seeks to be bigger. While WorldCat has catalog records only from libraries — including about 10,000 academic libraries — that pay to be part of OCLC, the Open Library will include records from anywhere, free of charge. And while librarians maintain WorldCat, the public would maintain Open Library.”
Open Library will scan all 20 million books so that they can be read online (Worldcat contains only 10 million records). If they are no longer protected under copyright, they can be downloaded for free. Otherwise they can be purchased, or sent to a third-party binder for a fee.
One interesting point comes from “Jessamyn C. West, a librarian based in Bethel, Vt., who runs a popular blog, Librarian.net, wants Open Library to flourish. The small libraries she counsels can’t afford subscriptions to WorldCat. As a result, their holdings are invisible to Vermonters searching online.”
