PLA Blog

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing there’s a pretty good chance that you already know about the Librarians’ Internet Index (lii.org) and that you’re subscribed to their “New This Week” newsletter. I’ve know about LII for about two years, and I’ve been getting the newsletter via RSS for about a year and a half, but I decided to go hear LII chief Karen Schneider give a talk called “Building the Ultimate Portal: Selection Secrets of the Librarians’ Internet Index.” Karen is an energetic, enthusiastic, and informative presenter, and I learned a few things I didn’t know. It was especially exciting, though, to see members of the audience come in not knowing a thing about LII or RSS and leaving planning to check both of them out (after all, who can live without RSS after seeing a demonstration that includes Cute Overload?).

In case you don’t know, LII is just what it sounds like–an index of high-quality websites compiled and annotated (and regularly checked) by librarians. You can browse through the 14 main topics and over 5000 subtopics, or you can search for a specific topic (more on that later). LII currently contains over 19,000 websites, and new ones are added each week. If you’d like to get a sampling of the new sites added each week, you can subscribe to “New This Week,” which comes out every Thursday and is available by e-mail or RSS. This past week’s issue included sites about ” money, insurance, climate change, contrails, crop diversity, John Cage, the Sears Tower, Spain, sunscreen, shell collecting, zinc, business etiquette, California authors and Washingtonian bloggers.” LII frequently features California (and sometimes Washington) specific topics because they receive funding from those states.

Each web site indexed by LII has its own page on the site. Here’s one I’m particularly interested in, being a pale-skinned person in a sunny, high elevation climate: How Does Sunscreen Work?. If you look at the page, you’ll see that there’s a description of the site, including what it covers and who produced it, with some other details sandwiched in between. In the upper right hand corner there is a little series of icons which let you do handy things like print or e-mail the item, or send a comment to the librarian who indexed the item. If you do a search, you’ll see another little icon next to each of your results–a magnifying glass. Clicking on that gives you a page like the one above–the complete metadata for the item, including who indexed it and what topics LII has indexed it under. Some entries also contain Library of Congress Subject Headings. As you can see, the topics are linked, so that if you want to see what else LII has indexed under that heading, you can do so with just a simple mouse click.

LII is browseable, but it’s also searchable, and later this summer, LII will be rolling out its spiffy new search engine, which uses Siderean and will provide faceted searching of LII content. Eventually, LII users will also be able to tag and rate the content on LII. Several audience members were a little apprehensive about the idea of user ratings. Wouldn’t they undermine the work of the librarians? Karen talked about user ratings as an added enhancement, and how sometimes the wisdom of the crowds can provide information that otherwise would not exist. As an example, she discussed her recent search for a video camera that would do a good job of recording in low light. Consumer Reports doesn’t rate video cameras on that criterion, but Amazon.com reviews turned out to be very helpful. Other audience members chimed in with how they use user ratings on travel sites or on Epicurious.

If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ve probably read innumerable debates on taxonomy vs. folksonomy and the wisdom of professionals vs. that of ordinary people. It was fascinating and illuminating to watch a mostly non-blogger crowd working their way through some of those same arguments (even if they weren’t using the same terms) and to see them realize that they already use some of both, and that the answer can be both/and, not either/or.

Tags: ALA2006, digital libraries, PLA Blog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.