SIS Meeting Information: June 5, 2002

Wednesday, June 5, 6:30 p.m.
Piccadilly Cafeteria
1900 34th St. N.
St. Petersburg, FL
727-328-1501

Meet Patsy Shipp Lieb (former newspaper reporter for the the New Port Richey Suncoast News; free-lance writer; and author of true-crime short stories: Murders in the Swampland by Patty Shipp - Xlibris (http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=11252). At our June meeting Patsy will recount her life as a writer, offer tips about free-lance writing and provide insights into the publishing industry.

Patsy's fiction, articles and poetry have appeared in numerous national magazines including Scholastic Scope and Star. Patsy and Web designer Evelyn Manic publish i (www.geocities.com/evmanak/ ) and Patsy's own A Writer's Notebook (www.geocities.com/patsylieb/)

RSVP to Anita Lindsay ( lindsaam@eckerd.edu or 727/864-7518) no later than Thursday, May 30th.

Piccadilly Cafeteria meals cost between $6 and $10. On June 5, pick up your meal in the service line and meet in a reserved room located at the south-west corner of the cafeteria.

Directions:

1. From Tampa, take I-275 South
2. Take the 22nd Ave. N exit - exit number 12
3. Keep RIGHT at the fork in the ramp.
4. Merge onto 22nd Ave. N.
5. Turn LEFT onto US-19 S.
6. Immediately get into RIGHT lane.
7. Turn RIGHT into the shopping center (corner of 22nd Ave. N. and US-19) (Staples, Winn-Dixie, and Piccadilly Cafeteria)

April 2002 meeting
Kathy Kaldenberg, Secretary

The April 2002 meeting of the Suncoast Information Specialists was started at 5:30 pm Tuesday April 2 at CAE USA (formerly BAE Systems and Reflectone) located at 4908 Tampa West Blvd in Tampa. Hostess for the meeting was Betsy King. Prior to and during the meeting, 29 attendees helped themselves to a delicious buffet of appetizers and desserts prepared by the CAE hospitality staff and sponsored by Dialog. Before the presentation started, introductions were made around the table. A significant contingent from the USF School of Library and Information Science was present. During a brief business meeting, Betsy King advised first timers that dues could be paid following the presentation. SIS membership is low at this point, down to about 30 members. She also reported that not all members subscribe to the electronic mail list SIS-L (see tblc.org/sis/list.htm). It was suggested that new members be automatically added to the electronic mail list.

Robert Childress, Manager of the Florida Market for Dialog, gave an informative presentation on the evolution and status of Dialog, prefaced by a short videotape. The following is a synopsis of the presentation.

"Information to change the world Dialog is the worldwide leader in providing online-based information services to organizations seeking competitive advantages in such fields as business, science, engineering, finance and law. Our products and services, such as Dialog®, Profound®, DataStar^TM, NewsEdge and Intelliscope^SM offer organizations the ability to precisely retrieve data from more than 800 million unique records of key information, accessible via the Internet or through delivery to enterprise intranets. Dialog products offer unparalleled depth and breadth of content coupled with the ability to search with precision and speed. If you want to know how critical Dialog is in the information age, you need to look no further than our range of operations, customer list and pioneering history. A presence felt around the globe. Dialog maintains direct operations in 32 countries worldwide throughout North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and the Asia Pacific, with agents/reseller relations in 18 countries. Dialog's worldwide headquarters is located in Cary, N.C., USA with global data centers in London; Bern, Switzerland; Boston and Mt. View, Calif., USA. Serving the world's information professionals and business leaders. Our global knowledge centers provide the highest levels of customer service to an international professional audience of more than 25,000 corporate clients and more than 100,000 professional researchers in over 103 countries. Over the years, our products, services and solutions have consistently received industry accolades for innovation, quality and leadership. Changing the world since 1972. In the late 1960s, long before the birth of the World Wide Web, a system designer with Lockheed had a vision: to make information retrieval available electronically, online. With the creation of the world's first online information retrieval system in 1972, Roger K. Summit literally revolutionized the way people search for information. In creating Dialog, Summit sought to contribute to the world's knowledge. We're still doing that today - with information to change the world.

A Thomson Company. Dialog is a business of The Thomson Corporation, www.thomson.com, a leading provider of integrated information solutions to business and professional markets worldwide, with 2001 revenues of US$7.2 billion. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the Toronto (TSE:TOC) and London Stock Exchanges."

If you are interested in a trial, contact Robert Childress, Manager of the Florida Market, Robert.childress@dialog.com.

Florida Library Association News

2002 FLA Annual Conference

The setting for this year's FLA Annual Conference was Daytona Beach. Roundtable discussion groups and programs on topics such as effective Internet searching, information literacy programs, staff recruitment and hiring, filtering, and technology training provided opportunities for attendees to learn about new techniques and programs and to share ideas with colleagues. In between sessions conference attendees explored the exhibits of 77 vendors, enjoyed a rocking good time at the Scholarship Fundraiser's 1950's-themed dinner and dance, and experienced the thrill of (virtual) racing at Daytona USA.

Former ALA President Nancy Kranich was the keynote speaker at the General Session. She spoke about the importance of speaking up about the vital role that libraries play. Libraries are essential for economic well-being, learning, rekinding a civil society, closing the digital divide, and providing comfort in times of uncertainty. Surveys and statistics indicate that libraries are more popular than ever. In the previous year 2/3 of American used their public libraries, 92% of library referenda passed. Public library circulation is increasing 3% a year and online use increased by 60%. "Americans love their libraries," she said, "but libraries can't live on love alone." We need to to speak with a unified voice and effectively present what we do to help people understand the importance of libraries. She urged people to to be advocates for libraries and to participate in the Campaign for America's Libraries.

Digital Inclusion Symposium 2002

The Institute for the Study of Digital Inclusion is holding a conference, Digital Inclusion Symposium 2002, on May 30, 2002. It is to be held at the Radisson Resort Parkway at the entrance to Celebration, near Orlando. Registration forms are available online at the address below. This symposium will be of great interest to librarians and other library personnel because of the important role libraries play as portals to information technology. Two important agenda items are:

• Help shape the future by providing access to Information Technology for all communities, so that all of our children have the opportunity to become participants in the knowledge-based society and global economy.
• Establish the Institute for the Study of Digital Inclusion as an independent and valued source for an information clearinghouse related to issues including needs assessment, strategic planning, programming, and budgeting.

For more information about this event, visit the Institute's web site at: www.stetson.edu/digitalinclusion/symposium.shtml or contact the institute at:
The Institute for the Study of Digital Inclusion
Tel: 386-822-7005; Fax: 386-822-7047
E-mail: digitalinclusion@stetson.edu
Web site: www.stetson.edu/digitalinclusion

Both of the above-referenced items (and many more) may be found at: www.flalib.org

"Working Faster and Smarter on the Web" by Rita Vine

Workshop, Florida Library Association Conference, April 9, 2002
Synopsis, by Alicia Ellison, Librarian, Hillsborough Community College--Ybor City Campus

[Rita Vine is founder and president of WorkingFaster.Com, an Internet-user training company in Canada. The company also develops customized search portals for corporate clients. Her presentation consisted of two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, each covering different topics -- a total of 5 hours. The workshop was sponsored the Florida and Caribbean Chapter of Special Libraries Association and Dialog®, in conjunction with the  Institutional Libraries Section of FLA, but it has applications for all types of libraries. The following is my distillation of her major points, with references to sources of additional information. Any of my own comments or references are enclosed in italics, in brackets, and followed by my initials. NOTE: All of Rita's handouts from this session are now available in .pdf format at www.workingfaster.com/links.html --AE]

The Truth About Real People

• Real people don't think like librarians…nor should they have to do so. Boolean searching isn’t really that useful anymore, with today’s massive databases, such as those in a search engines, and which have no thesaurus.
• Real people just want the answers. Think of whether you want your financial advisor to teach you how to chart an analysis of your financial picture…or do you want her to do the analysis and present you with options.
• When we give people what they want, we open the door to a relationship. Librarians are in the relationship business, one relationship at a time. Give them what they want first. After you’ve hooked them, you can teach them other things.
• Real people don’t want to "evaluate" web sites. It is futile and a turn-off to try to teach them to do this. The Web medium lends itself to skimming and discourages deep reading.
• Real people do not read help screens, they type poorly, they do not construct good queries, and they do not know how to organize and save results.
• The majority of learning happens between friends, not in rigid situations.
• Real people ask their peers about how find information. Peer groups are "communities of practice."  Libraries are not integrated parts of these communities, so the library is not the first choice for people to seek information. These peers are e-fluentials, and knowledge-seekers go to them because they don’t intimidate and don’t give too much information, but they know a little bit more than the knowledge-seeker.
• Libraries must market to these e-fluentials (teachers, group leaders), find out where they "hang," what they read.
• Adults see the Web as an information resource. Kids also see the Web as an information resource, but they also see it as an environment in which to relax, communicate and play games; and they see the world of information being a mouse-click away. So, librarians must create "one-stop shopping" on the library Web site, and consider e-learning, e-reference, and chat reference.
• We librarians are too enmeshed in our culture, in the "goodness and truth of libraries," to see how our customers see us, or fear us.
• We must make learning shorter and more focused, in teaching sessions as well as the reference desk (no more than two or three ideas in a one-hour training session).
• Use their terms, i.e. don’t bother calling it a "database" if they ask you for a "search engine" [see above, "real people don’t think like librarians"-AE].
• Our view of information is complicated. For the generation that thinks that the world of information is just a mouse-click away, convey the idea of the library’s Web page as the starting off point for paid information (books, periodicals) and the "free Web" (using resources that we recommend) as access to "grey" literature (see Rita’s article, "Real People Don’t Do Boolean: Helping End Users Search Faster and Smarter on the Web," Information Outlook, March 2001 (available in full-text through www.findarticles.com).

For more information about Real People, see Rita’s presentation, How Can Librarians Help Know-It-All Web Searchers? www.workingfaster.com/ola2002.pdf .

• Search engines are just too big. We want fewer results that are:
  • High quality.
  • Best of the breed.
  • Unambiguously "a-ha" - the "wow" factor does not happen with common-topic searches.
• "True" search engines translate keywords into algorithms that compare query terms to the contents of spidered databases. Results are rank-ordered according to how often these results are linked by other pages.
• Every search engine except Google:
  • Buys its spidered databases from INKTOMI. Google spiders its own.
  • Requires sites to pay for placement and pay for consideration to be included (Yahoo no longer accepts a site for consideration without payment).
  • Requires sites to pay for spider (INKTOMI makes the spider search engine that is purchased by many search engines).
  • Measures "click-through" results ("powered by DIRECT HIT"). This software measures clicking behavior, i.e. where you go, how deep you go, etc. through cookie technology. It aggregates the behavior of all users--including clicks on ads, partner sites, etc.-- and produces "top ten" hits. Therefore, popularity feeds on itself, and the quality resources are de-emphasized.
• Therefore, search results are skewed because:
  • Pay-for-placement displaces content.
  • Popularity displaces content - popular pages become more popular, while other high-quality, unlinked pages continue to disappear.
  • Users don't know how to structure their queries properly.
  • There is much, i.e. "the invisible Web", that cannot be indexed, i.e. databases, deep pages, short pages [see http://www.invisible-web.net/ --AE]. PUBMED is an example of a database that cannot be spidered, and therefore its contents will not come up in keyword queries on search engines.
• Even Google can only cover at most 30% of the Web.
• Search engines should only be used for very specific searches, i.e.:
  • Known Web sites.
  • Missing pieces.
  • Needles-in-a-haystack.
  • Distinctively-named organizations and people.
• Use phrase searching with quotation marks for improved results. Forget Boolean!
• If you must use a search engine:
  • If your answer is not in the first 10 results, move on.
  • Use more than one search engine, rather than spending a lot of time trying different searches on the same tool.
  • Use lower-case only in your search terms.
  • Don’t use phrase restrictions lightly, but rather carefully consider them, i.e. when you know that the phrase will appear the way you type it, and when there is no other way to limit your search.

Browsing Is Better, or, Try Subject Starters

• De-emphasize search engines and emphasize high-quality, filtered, subject directories, or "guided hierarchies", i.e. LII, BUBL-Link, Pac-Info (public records). See searchportfolio.com/searchlite.html for additional recommended subject directories.
• By using subject directories, you bypass:
  • Users’ inability to formulate good search queries.
  • Users’ inability to type correctly.
• Do not search subject directories as you would a search engine. Tools that are not "true" search engines (see above, "The Truth About Search Engines") do not index every word. They are tiny, inconsistent, limited databases. If you must search, use one general keyword, e.g. to identify a subject heading withink the hierarchy.
• Think before you click [what a concept! --AE].
• Scan the page. Most people don’t scroll [Really? We've never encountered that, have we? --AE].
• Use quick-fact lookup tools, i.e. DeskRef, YourDictionary.com, for ready-reference.
• To find people:
  • If the name is distinctive, try a search engine.
  • Phone books: teldir.com.
  • Public records: pac-info.com (over 6,000 public records databases).

For more information on search engines and subject starters, and training tips, see Rita’s article, "Real People Don’t Do Boolean: Helping End Users Search Faster and Smarter on the Web," Information Outlook, March 2001 (available in full-text through www.findarticles.com ).

Research Tips

Four stages of research (see Rita's search planning worksheet at www.workingfaster.com/worksheetinfo.html):

1. Gather: Keep track of where you go. To track good hits for later review, but don’t put them in Favorites. Instead, right-click and create a short-cut on the desktop. Then, create a folder for gathered resources. These are easier to access and delete than Favorites. Also, see "Search Planning Worksheet" in Session Handout.. Read less at this stage. Just gather, and recurrence/repetition will show when to stop.
2. Select. The Web’s interactivity makes it easy to get sidetracked and hard to know when to stop.
3. Process.
4. Communicate.

Training Tips

• Introduce great starting points
• Show them why search engines don’t work.
• Demonstrate good search engine search
• Show them how the library can help them.
• Help them organize their search (understand the four stages of research).
• Aim high - target the "experts" - you’ll still reach the lower-end users. Everyone can point and click.
• Assess learner needs carefully.
• Saying it isn’t learning it-allow time for hands-on-they must replicate.
• Teach rules.
• Teach the lost art of browsing.
• Give them distilled, simple concepts-which they can retain when they leave.
• This approach does the following:
  • Simplifies lives
  • Empowers users to be self-sufficient.
  • Makes them good information consumers.
  • Lets librarians do what they do best, i.e. advise and recommend.

For a fuller discussion of training tips, see Rita’s article, "Real People Don’t Do Boolean: Helping End Users Search Faster and Smarter on the Web," Information Outlook, March 2001 (available in full-text through http://www.findarticles.com).

If you have any suggestions for content, please let me know. We are all interested in interesting websites, meetings and special events (entertainment included), and personal/professional accomplishments.
Rebecca C. Forman, Editor (Interscience, Inc., 813-885-4774 ; rforman@gte.net)