Infoblog

Archive for the ‘Evaluating information’ Category

Christina Kerley of ckEpiphany describes her services as “a marketing consultancy providing strategy, planning and program management services.” In August, she asked her blog readers to respond to the question, “What is the single greatest point of value you receive from blogging?” Last week she wrote about the results in her blog.
Check out her wonderful collage compilation pdf both for a good overview of why people love blogging as well as some great marketing ideas for library blogs.

Wowza! The past week or two has seen the release of two big upgrades: Firefox 2.0 & Internet Explorer 7.0. Firefox’s last big upgrade was version one, which was released just two years ago. Internet Explorer hasn’t seen a major upgrade since version 6 came out in 2001. Beta versions of IE 7 have been out for a while (I downloaded one beta and ended up reformatting my hard drive – ick!).
Upgrading to Firefox 2.0 is no big deal and a pretty small download, and if you’re running Firefox version 1.whatever you’ll have no trouble upgrading to 2.0. What about IE 7? Well for starters it’s a slower install and it also runs a check to make sure you have a legit copy of Windows XP before it will even start downloading. Then there are the system requirements: you MUST have at least Windows XP with Service Pack 2 – no Win 98 or Win NT machines or Macs need apply.
Read more about the two browsers here and here.

The blog entry titled Innovation Strategies Summit: Ethnography and new product development from Innovation Weblog compares using ethnography “the process of doing observational research, going into the field to watch how customers utilize your products” vs. focus groups. There are interesting insights for library service.

If your library has public access computers, those computers probably have USB ports. The question for libraries to ponder is: do you or do you not allow people to use USB flash drives (also known as USB micro drives, or sometimes USB jump drives) in those ports? This helpful post summarizes the results of a debate about this very topic that recently raged on Web4Lib.
This page does a nice job of laying out the pros and cons of providing access, and also offers helpful tips on ways to protect your public computers from any possible malicious user. A helpful read!

Here’s a simple set of guidelines to check from the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University.

The second issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter has a great article by Karen Schneider (of lii.org) on the steps for reviewing websites — Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. Read it, print it, hand it out.

This short article from The Chronicle of Higher Education is an excellent read for those who work with information seekers.
Robert Parks ends The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science with:

…in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.