ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries 4 0 8 / C&RL News Conference Circuit Com puters in lib ra rie s ’ 9 7 : Looking for q u ality By Sean M aloney Getting a handle on the Web he 1997 Computers in Libraries Confer­ ence held March 10– 12 in Arlington, Vir­T ginia, evidenced a tremendous concern with evaluation and quality of the Internet. There was a sense among the 3,558 attendees that the world is finally aware of this thing that some of us have known about and used for a decade and more. But the question is, how can we tread through the morass o f information and guide our patrons/clientele/students to find the nuggets of gold? There was a sense that the techies had unleashed a monster, and it was now up to the grunt in the trenches to find a way to straighten out the mess. Pushing an d pulling inform ation for clients The “Filtering the Internet & World Wide W eb” session had a huge overflow, with people sit­ ting in the aisles, standing along the walls, and spilling out into the hallway. The panelists pre­ sented sophisticated strategies for taking the enormous amount o f electronic information available and making it more accessible to their clientele, and for evaluating the information once it is retrieved. Peter Banholzer of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center described how they wrote a filter to convert ISI’s Current Con­ tents tape information into HTML format to make the data more usable. Paul Pinella of In­ dividual, Inc. described his company’s software product that uses in-house intranets to filter information out on the Web in both push and pull modes. The aim is to create a highly rel­ evant, ranked daily briefing document about a firm or company’s industry, profiled to each person’s organizational requirements, that takes no more than ten minutes to read. The infor­ mation is gathered from the Internet, internal company sources, proprietary databases, and files the company subscribes to; the most rel­ evant items are “pushed” into the person’s e- mail box, with links for the subscriber to then go out and “pull” more information if desired. The panel on “Evaluating the Quality of In­ formation on the Internet” presented criteria that users need to apply to all of this informa­ tion that is pushed and pulled into their sight and sites: timeliness, authority, stability o f in­ formation, appropriate format, clarity— all of these are qualitative hallmarks that librarians have applied to print sources since our begin­ nings. D ead technology Much of the love/hate ambivalence for the In­ ternet and high technology was manifest at the session called “Dead Technology: A View From Tomorrow.” With everyone relaxed and in a jovial mood, Eric Flowers hosted a roast-like discussion of technologies— dead, dying, dead- on-arrival, and still-born— some of which are still regarded by many as the here-and-now, up-to-the-minute cutting edge. In Flowers’s view, dead technology is “anything less than” 155 megs/second, fiber optic, and time and dis­ tance insensitive. Dead also are services that provide only “meta-information,” i.e., indexing rather than full text; text-based catalogs; periodicals in aca­ demic libraries; and seats in academic libraries. In keeping with the festive mood, Flowers also said that “top ten lists are dead.” Katie Hover, from Microsoft Corp. library, took some good-natured ribbing from the Mac philes and cheers from the die-hard PC-ers. To her suggestion that floppy disks were dead, hoots of laughter about “there go the freebies from AOL” were voiced. Another endangered Sean Maloney is coordinator o f reference services at Siena College in Loudonville, New York; e-mail: maloney@siena.edu mailto:maloney@siena.edu Ju n e 19 9 7 / 409 s p e c ie s is any p ro d u ct n o t I n t e r n e t- enabled, as are proprietary online services. She did not spare Microsoft products— Bob, Mi­ crosoft Scenes, modular windows, and others were buried. M em ory is cheap Greg Notess o f Montana State University- Bozeman declared the death of “comic book” se a r ch e n g in e s — read A rch ie, V e ro n ica , Jughead, et al. Vanderbilt University’s Marshall Breeding illustrated a scenario w here there was an old, huge IBM In Flow ers’s v ie w , dead technology is “ anything less than” 155 m egs/sec ond, fiber optic, and time and distance insensitive. mainframe that they had for years, limping along, patching and bubble- gum m ing, th at had (relatively) very little memory. They had to be very parsimonious with every bit of pro­ gram to accommodate the limits of the machine. Eventually they were able to purchase a cut­ ting-edge Sun machine that took up only a small portion of the space of the IBM, but had a huge memory. However, they have had to constantly upgrade the machine’s memory because the new programs are memory hogs— there seems to be little concern on the part of programmers to be efficient because memory is so cheap. Marshall also took a hack at hackers, who don’t seem to need jobs or worry about tenure. All our technology will be dead unless security im­ proves, and much of the software is inherently insecure. Richard Hulser of IBM had on his obsoles­ cence list “secure jo b s” (met with nervous, groaning laughter), all operating systems, Web search engines, mice, and w a te r -c o o le d mainframes. S c o tt B ra n d t o f Purdue University ex­ co riated the current sea rch en g in e s that give a searcher thou­ sands of “hits” despite their seemingly scien­ tific “relevancy” rank­ ings. Some other sessions that also addressed the search for quality were “The HTML Mon­ ster: Is It R eally N e ce ssa ry to L earn ?” “WebPAGES: Graphic Design Principles and Navigation,” and “Web Site Evolution: Control­ ling the Monster.” ■