Your mission in 50 milliseconds, if you choose to accept...

As a web designer by heart and an enthusiast for aesthetically sound websites, I truly enjoyed the readings for this past week. The two articles that were required this week were, Gitte Lindgaard’s Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! and Ron Atkinson’s Transversality and the Role of the Library as Fair Witness.

Atkinson’s article over libraries as fair witnesses proved to be truly interesting. It seems that all of my professional work has been conducted in a library. Even though I’m 23 and have worked in a library setting for just over 5 years, I have noticed major trends and shifts in that time. From a time where the library was a haven of treasured books to a time where students huddled around the free Internet access computers. As with every organization and business, technology has changed everything. Being a lover of technology and a person who embraces change, I enjoy this time of change and emerging technology; however, libraries have been stuck in limbo over this very subject. According to the text, “authenticity and integrity are mechanical characteristics of digital objects; they do not speak to deeper questions of weather the contents of digital document are accurate and truthful when judged objectively.” This statement is related to the way that libraries view access and application utility. These two utilities must be understood by libraries because of the ever-changing landscape of technology.

The article also stated, “the function of the fair witness must not only be to supply the user with dependable access to the object but also to supply the user with the capacity to perceive or develop reliable contents—without which subjective user decisions about the meaning and value of an object are not possible.” The object of libraries as fair witness is simple, supply dependable sources/objects/items and helps translate how to use those items and helping users define their own information needs.

The second article (my favorite out of the two), was on the visual appeal of certain websites and the first impressions given by those websites. The article basically concluded that more research is truly needed to capture the overall opinion of first impressions on websites. From my experience of web design, I can tell that the aesthetic value is truly VALUABLE! The purpose having such a visually appealing website is to give the viewer something intangible, something they can form a memory around, something that will keep them coming back for more. Information that is not placed in an aesthetically sound format could be just as un-useful as lost information. Information needs the right medium to be displaced and the right amount of visual appeal to keep the viewer and keep them coming back. I will truly heed this information as designing my prototype and hopefully I will be able to find the balance between creativity and visual appeal that will display my information in all its glory.

Standards, What are They Good For??

“The only way we resolve these issues as an industry is we have to work together. We need collaboration and standards. We need to share information and knowledge.” This quote by Robin Saxby truly illustrates the need for standards in today’s global society and the importance of information and knowledge sharing.

In the two articles for this week’s journal assignment, I was plagued with the lack of use of standards in web components. The first article by Khaled A.F. Mohamed, The Impact of Metadata in Web Resources Discovering, focused on the use of Meta tags and Dublin core tags in web pages. Mohamed’s research found that there are no great differences in page rankings between using Meta tags and Dublin Core. Mohamed’s research also helped me understand some things better as well. I have always been a firm believer in Meta tags in html documents. But now that this research has shown that there are no significant changes in rank order, it makes me wonder what else can I do as a web developer to ensure my page is getting hits?

Even though Meta tags do not ensure ranking satisfaction, I believe they are an essential piece of web documents. They are the little piece of information given about a webpage for personal classification and even though they may not help with ranking, they help with classification. Since more advanced searching is a possibility in the future, standards such as Meta tags can be used more accurately helping ensuring their success.

The other article title, rdfs:frbr–Towards an Implementation Model for Library Catalogs Using Semantic Web Technology by Stefan Gradmann. This article was kind of frustrating for me on the respect that I’ve never heard much about rdfs frbr elements. I had to look at additional web pages to fully understand the context of this article. Gradmann made his opinion clear when it outlined the benefits of having a rdfs:frbr based implementation model for web based catalogs. These elements with RDF schema can help ensure that documents or records are not lost in the ‘hidden web’ and allow for some searching objectivity.


As information professionals, we must always be on the look out for upcoming standards and help instill these standards in our own work. If information professionals cannot even follow the standards, why have information standards in the first place? I believe we must start making a way for more standardization on the Internet. If not us, then who, if not now, when?

Big Brother is Watching Your Information

Big Brother is being blamed for trying to control people and their information. This isn’t from George Orwell’s classic 1984, but how the world is not handling and deciphering information. Chapter 8 of The Anarchist in the Library, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s clearly displayed a distain for government agencies trying to control information.

Vaidhyanathan also addresses topics in this 8th chapter over the perfect library, the real library, the information elite, and the power anxious. The perfect library touched on the belief that information should be free and easily accessible for anyone, anytime. In this utopic attitude, the abusers of information make ample use and use it to harm others, businesses, and the social fabric of the given culture. Vaidhyanathan also addresses the USA Patriot Act and how it monitors electronic communication, which could hurt libraries and librarians’ beliefs. The real library setting which many people in this class understand is a little different than the “perfect library” setting. A real library tries as hard as it can to relay information in various mediums with certain restrictions on who and how individuals get that information.

At the end of Vaidhyanathan’s article he states the need for a republican model of information distribution. I could not agree more with this statement. The future of information depends greatly on how it is collected, stored, and disseminated. If information is dependent on governmental or organizational authorization, how accurate of information can it be? How can regulated information serve the greater purpose and allow individuals the option of making their own choices? These questions we must answer soon for if we don’t, the affects may be irreversible.

The second item on the reading list this was an article Memex at 60: Internet or IPod by Richard H. Veith breaks a part a 1945 article in which Vannevar Bush makes predictions on technologies. Veith states the original predications and how these predications have lead to many different variations. Veith describes how the original idea of a Memex (memory extender) would be something similar to an IPod. There are many similarities to the Memex idea and an IPod. They include: easily used, can accommodate large amounts of data in a very small space, owners can build very personal collections, etc.). Veith states that over the years Memex integrity has been scattered in various articles and has been compared to items of no similarity. This brings up an interesting topic, how safe is information from misinterpretation? This question, I really do not have the answer to, but I believe it stems from individuals going off of previous knowledge or past information on certain topics and formulating ideas and concepts around the knowledge and information even though it may not be accurate.

Two completely different topics with one common theme, information dissemination; one case information is being controlled by the government and the other is being completely misinterpreted. We as information professionals need to help stop these information meltdowns and allow for greater information gathering and loosen the control of information. It is now in our hands, but the questions are, how can we change it and will we?