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Current Cities Volume 13 Number 03
Current Cites
Volume 13, no. 3, March 2002
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2002/cc02.13.3.html
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Terry Huwe, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, [7]Margaret Phillips, [8]Roy Tennant
Allen, Maryellen. "A Case Study of the Usability Testing of the
University of South Florida's Virtual Library Interface Design"
[9]Online Information Review 26(1) (2002): 40-53. - This month's
addition to the growing literature on usability in libraries concerns
the trials and tribulations of a Web site redesign at University of
South Florida Libraries. Both successes and failures are reported as
the development team refines their testing procedures. Anyone who's
been through the process of reconciling often highly contradictory
goals will know how rocky a road a site redesign can be. Hints of
differences in the literature not only make for interesting reading
but they also helpfully alert us to challenges we too are likely to
face when going down the same road. Here the problem was whether to
use "plain, straightforward language" or "library jargon". Apparently
library jargon won out. - [10]LRK
Anhang, Abe and Steve Coffman. "The Great Reference Debate"
[11]American Libraries 33(3) (March 2002): 50-54. - The debate of the
title is based on the proposition "Be it reolved that reference
librarians are toast." The authors debated this issue at the Ontario
Library Association Super Conference in Toronto in February 2001, of
which this article is a summary. Abe Anhang debates for the
proposition, while Coffman debates against. As it turns out, they both
believe that reference librarians "as we know them -- ...who sit
behind desks for five or six hours a day...waiting for people to walk
up and ask questions" are toast. If you ignore the non-debate,
Coffman's part does a good job of identifying six reasons why
reference librarians definitely are not toast -- as long as we can
meet our users where and when they want to be served. - [12]RT
Brennan, Christopher and Eileen O'Hara. "Murphy Was a Librarian: a
Case Study in How Not to Handle a Systems Crash" [13]Computers in
Libraries 22(3) (March 2002): 10-12,72. - Disaster strikes Drake
Library at SUNY Brockport when a system glitch vaporizes all the MARC
records from their bib catalog. Backup was faulty and all they had to
fall back on was a data-run they had submitted five months earlier to
an outside organization for the purposes of producing a union catalog.
The public service message coming out of this article is emphasized
repeatedly by the authors: communicate with your vendor to make sure
that effective backup procedures are in place and back up early and
often. - [14]LRK
Carlson, Scott and Andrea L. Foster. "Colleges Fear Anti-Terrorism Law
Could Turn Them into Big Brother" [15]Chronicle of Higher Education
48(25) (March 1, 2002): A31-A32. - Let's take a break from topics like
the Dublin Core, metadata and XML and consider privacy and
anti-terrorism in the information age. In October, the USA Patriot Act
was enacted giving law enforcement extra tools to track suspected
terrorists including the right to open student computer files or,
potentially, to see student library records. This kind of invasion of
privacy, some believe, endangers the "climate of free inquiry"
traditional to the academic environment. Some universities have
instituted guidelines for responding to law enforcement requests made
under the new law. At Cornell, if a staff member is asked by a law
enforcement agent to disclose information about a student, they should
first contact the information technology policy advisor who will
consult with the university's lawyers. In resonse to the Patriot Act,
the library community with ALA and other library administrators at the
healm, remains steadfast in its advocacy of privacy rights. - [16]MP
Ellis, John. [17]"All the News That's Fit to Blog" [18]Fast Company
(April 2002) (http://www.fastcompany.com/online/57/jellis.html). -
Weblogs are hot, hot, hot. One can only wonder if the enthusiasm for
them will wane now that they are becoming a mainstream phenomenon. In
this article, Ellis points out the shortcomings of the "boring
pundits" who dominate newspaper op-ed pages and political talk shows,
and compares them (unfavorably, of course) to the lively new world of
weblogs. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of pundits are taking
up blogging themselves -- i.e., [19]Andrew Sullivan
(http://www.andrewsullivan.com/), [20]Virginia Postrel
(http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html), and [21]Mickey Kaus
(http://www.kausfiles.com/). There are any number of free tools that
allow anyone to set up a weblog and begin publishing immediately,
which naturally results in a lot of swill, but also generates a
surprising amount of eloquent, dynamic discourse. Bloggers, says
Ellis, "assume that their readers are as smart as they are, if not
smarter." And rather than trying to keep you at their site by any
means necessary, they routinely send you out across the Web by posting
links from diverse and often obscure sources. The underlying
technology -- and philosophy -- is peer-to-peer. - [22]SK
Emery, David. [23]"The Nigerian E-Mail Hoax: West African Scammers
Take to the Net" [24]SFGate (March 14, 2002)
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/03/
14/nig erscam.DTL) - Probably you've already gotten one (or
more...many more) of these e-mails, ostensibly from some high official
in the government of Nigeria, Ghana or another West African country.
This individual urgently seeks your help in transferring a large chunk
of the national treasury or whatever into a U.S. bank account. All you
have to do is send this person your bank account number so he or she
can transfer the money, and he or she will reward your kindness with
an attractive percentage. Amazingly, people keep falling for
variations of this scam; the Secret Service says one percent of the
people thus solicited will respond, and the U.S. Postal Service
estimates losses to American citizens of more than $100 million
annually. Who are these pigeons? "Greed and gullibility obviously
figure in," as do personality traits like risk-taking, susceptibility
to flattery or intimidation, and lack of interest in news/current
events. As you might suspect, the Internet has served as a fertile
breeding ground for scams of this nature. According to the website
Internet Fraud Watch (http://www.fraud.org/), "Nigerian Money Offers"
-- also called "Nigerian Advance-Fee Fraud" or "419 Scam" ("419" being
the relevant section of the country's criminal code) -- surged up the
charts last year, from seventh to third place, on the list of the most
common types of online fraud. Next time you receive one of these
e-mails, forward it to the Secret Service for inclusion in their
database: [25]419.fcd@usss.treas.gov. - [26]SK
Kling, Rob, Lisa Spector, and Geoff McKim. [27]Locally Controlled
Scholarly Publishing via the Internet: The Guild Model. CSI Working
Paper No. WP-02-01.
(http://www.slis.indiana.edu/csi/WP/WP02-01B.html). - Kling et al.
suggest that too little attention has been paid to the working papers
and technical reports of academic departments (and other research
units) as a model of free scholarly publishing. The "Guild Model"
relies on the academic reputation of the sponsoring department to
establish the reputation of its research manuscript archive. In order
to publish papers in the archive, authors must be affiliated with the
department. Individual faculty contributions to a department's archive
do not undergo peer review; however, their authors have undergone
"career review" as part of the hiring and tenure process, and this
establishes their scholarly credentials. This interesting and
thoughtful paper includes examples of the Guild Model and a
consideration of its pros and cons.- [28]CB
Kravchyna, V., and Hastings, S. K. [29]Informational Value of Museum
Web Sites [30]First Monday 7(2) (February 4th 2002)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_2/kravchyna/). - This
article assesses the behavior of users in using museum Web sites, an
interesting subject for librarians because the experience of users
with this type of web site charts a truly new application for museums.
The authors launched an extensive Internet survey of museum users, and
report on their findings. Among the chief news: most people are used
to audio and video programs and enjoy these formats on the web, and a
high percentage or respondents visited a museum web site before
visiting the museum itself. Obviously, an Internet-using population
does not tell the whole story of user populations for museum
directors, but it's an important segment of that population. The
authors frame this paper as part of a larger investigation into the
value of museum Web sites, and they make good use of tables and charts
to illustrate their findings. The authors conclude that their findings
can help guide database design, metadata creation, and retrieval
options for museums; indeed, one hopes they're paying attention. -
[31]TH
McClure, Charles R., R. David Lankes, Melissa Gross, and Beverly
Choltco-Devlin. [32]Statistics, Measures, and Quality Standards for
Assessing Digital Reference Library Services: Guidelines and
Procedures Field Test Draft: March 8, 2002. Syracuse, NY: Information
Institute of Syracuse, 2002.
(http://quartz.syr.edu/quality/Field_Test_Draft.pdf). - This manual,
and its accompanying [33]instructions for field testing
(http://quartz.syr.edu/quality/FTInstructions.pdf) are still in draft
form, and the authors invite anyone who wishes to test them to contact
them for more information. Although digital reference service can
still be considered to be in its infancy, it's nice to know that as
libraries begin to develop these services that there will be a common
metric that can be used to measure the effectiveness of those
services. - [34]RT
McCord, Alan. [35]"Are You Ready to Discuss IT Outsourcing on Your
Campus?" [36]EDUCAUSE Quarterly 25(1): 12-19
(http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0212.pdf). - If there's any
one message to derive from this article, it's that we can't outsource
away our IT problems. We have to understand them and their true costs
before even thinking about handing them over to an outside agency.
Candidates for outsourcing, the author argues, include larger
'infrastructure' services: networking, server management and security.
He's pretty even-handed on both the pros and cons of going this route.
He argues that while IT is essential to our efforts in the academic
world, it isn't one of our 'core competencies'. His urge for IT
departments to develop more 'private-sector-like thinking and skills'
is something everyone can agree with, though where the
private-sector-like financing will come from is chronically unclear.
It won't come from outsourcing. Costs there, the author advises, are
likely to be a tad higher. - [37]LRK
Pantic, Drazen. [38]"Internet the Globalizer, and the Impossibility of
the Impossibility of the Global Dialog." [39]First Monday 7(1)
(January 7, 2002)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_1/pantic/). - "The world's
information pool now truly originates in a multitude of sources",
Pantic says, and no event showed this better than the September 11
attacks. In the wake of those days in September, the Internet assumed
a powerful new role as a source of independent and diversified news.
This article explores that new role and casts the drama of the
Internet's as change agent as a battle between ideas of modernity and
local culture. There is evidence, he argues, that a
"trans-civilizational" dialogue is crying out to be released so much
so that it may trump cultural behavior such as centralized control of
media. This brief article succinctly argues that the Internet remains
surprisingly resilient in the face of censorship efforts, despite the
tensions between open systems and centralized governments. - [40]TH
Reilly, Bernard J. [41]"What the Cultural Sector Can Learn From Enron"
[42]First Monday 7(2) (February 4, 2002)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_2/reilly/). - The very
public and messy debacle that engulfed the Enron Corporation is a
metaphorical jumping-off point for the author's premise that a similar
hall of cards may be lurking in the non-profit information sectors.
That's a troubling possibility if there's any weight to it, and Reilly
argues his case based on one key similarity: libraries, museums and
other cultural repositories now "trade" in "knowledge" assets as much
as with the assets themselves. The difference lies in the nature of
the asset, if any. He poses the question, is there a material
difference between coal and oil deposits and museum collections?
Whether you agree or not, this Enron analogy will give you pause.
"Artistic and cultural products are no longer objects, like books,
paintings, sculpture...nor are they discrete, self-contained events in
time, like musical performances, dance performances, and so forth," he
asserts. The new infrastructure for cultural resources is built out of
the licenses and contractual agreements protecting them. This "matrix"
of conditions enables preservation, and even if bits of that matrix
unravel, preservation strategies may be threatened. After an
interesting exploration of this theory, he argues for better
safeguards ("underwriting"): namely, a call for "best practices" in
contract negotiation and licensing. The message to librarians is, once
again, that libraries are no longer just places; they are also
"processes" and matrices of relationships. - [43]TH
Salkever, Alex. [44]"Guard Copyrights, Don't Jail Innovation"
[45]BusinessWeek Online (27 March 2002)
(http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2002/nf20020327_2364.h
tm). - Imagine a parallel universe where every piece of electronic
equipment that could utilize or record digital information had
built-in copy-protection features that allowed content owners to
completely control how their information was used on that device. Want
to live there? You will if the [46]Consumer Broadband and Digital
Television Promotion Act, which was recently introduced by Senator
Ernest F. Hollings, becomes law. Alex Salkever, the BusinessWeek
Online Technology Editor, doesn't want to live there, and in this
insightful article he tells us why. - [47]CB
Tedeschi, Bob. [48]"Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another
Fad?" [49]The New York Times (February 25, 2002)
(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/25/technology/ebusiness/25ECOM.html?ei
=5040& en=9876919c1afb6ed7&ex=1015304400) - Is the weblog phenomenon
breaking ground as "a truly new media species," or is it just the
latest Information Age fad? It depends on who you ask...but there's no
denying the popularity of these often very personal online journals.
This article cites a statistic putting the current number of bloggers
at approximately 500,000. What's fueling this boom are the advances in
blog technology that make it easy to post short bursts of text
frequently rather than having to update an entire Web page. Some
companies see an opportunity in offering and supporting these
technologies, notably Blogger.com and Userland Software, which hint
that the next wave of interest in blogging may come from the corporate
sector. Yet some Webheads remain skeptical, feeling it will ultimately
prove futile expecting users to return to your weblog site day after
day to keep up with your latest postings. According to this article,
one Net consultancy in New York stopped posting to its weblog and
simply started e-mailing the updated information to interested
parties. - [50]SK
Zieger, Anne. [51]"Bust the Spam Brigade" [52]IBM developerWorks
(February 2002)
(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wi-spam.html) - That
your e-mail inbox is clogged with swill is bad enough. Alas, this
article predicts an impending boom in wireless spam -- "Wherever there
are large groups of networked users, marketing messages are sure to
follow." But don't rush to toss that cell phone or PDA off the nearest
bridge just yet. The Good Guys are working on technologies that could
ameliorate the problem. "Unsolicited commercial messages" of the
wireless kind have already become a problem in Japan, where carrier
NTT DoCoMo serves some 30 million subscribers. The "mobile marketing"
types are chomping at the bit to offer you wireless coupons and other
come-ons, ultimately based on your geographic location. The official
party line of this industry's trade group -- yes, they have one; it's
called the Mobile Marketing Association (formerly the [53]Wireless
Advertising Association -- http://www.waaglobal.org/) -- is that
commercial wireless messages should only be sent to consumers who wish
to receive them. But, as with e-mail spam, "it's not the upstanding
members of professional associations" who are causing the problem;
rather, "it's the rogues with the willingness to flout professional
conventions." The article briefly describes some potential technology
solutions -- Brightmail's Mthree application, which lets users set
rules for messages forwarded through wired e-mail gateways; "mobile
messaging controls" written in Java 2, Micro Edition; and Qualcomm's
Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW), "another option for
those who need to roll their own spam-filtering solution." Links to
related resources are offered at the end of the article. - [54]SK
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 13(3) (March 2002) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California All
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