CONTENTS:

• Evaluating an Online Information Service for Management
• The Internet Archive

EVALUATING AN ONLINE INFORMATION SERVICE FOR MANAGEMENT

This is an article from one of my favorite Web sites, LLRX.com (http://www.llrx.com/about.htm). T. R. Halvorson is, among other things, author of Law of the Super Searchers: The Online Secrets of Top Legal Researchers. Halvorson makes a good case for law librarians to use a standardized format for evaluating online information services. While it does target law librarians, it contains a lot of great ideas for researchers who are evaluating online services.

In the section "The Categories and Checklist," Halvorson suggests using the Southern California Online Users Group (SCOUG) scale for evaluating online services. The categories allow standardized comparison with sufficient detail for a researcher to make a good decision. He provides a link to a thorough list of questions he developed for legal information services evaluation (http://www.llrx.com/features/checklist4evaluation.htm). With a little work, his questions can be adapted to evaluate the content information services researchers use.

A practical person, Halvorson acknowledges that management does not want to see the comparative detail one of us would use to make a decision. In the section entitled "An IDM Cheat Sheet," he suggests a condensed version of the SCOUG scale that provides a concise and easy-to-read format for presenting a case or comparison to the budgetary decision maker. Halvorson even provides an example of how he would use the IDM short format for a legal information service (http://www.llrx.com/features/idm_fastcase.htm). His work would have to be adapted for evaluating something like Hoover's or D&B, but it's sure easier than starting from scratch!

http://www.llrx.com/features/fastcase.htm

THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit dedicated to building an historical Internet Library for access by historians, scholars, librarians and researchers (I don't think that means us). The archive is still under construction and probably will be for some time. Its creators promise more user-friendly tools for surfing the archives in the future.

When you use the archives you must agree to its Terms of Use. I found two statements in the Terms that may raise ethical concerns for researchers. For a researcher, agreeing "not to collect or store personal data about anyone" could be an issue. For freelance researchers, the statement, "In particular, you certify that your use of any part of the Archive's Collections will be noncommercial and will be limited to non-infringing or fair use under copyright law" may be problematical in that we incorporate information into profiles, then sell it to a client.

The archive does have some cool stuff. Use the WayBack Machine to find historical URLs. I entered the URL for Oregon Business Magazine and found links to a few issues as far back as 1996. Also, I had a bunch of hits that told me the site was under construction. I think Oregon Business Magazine must employ the contractor who worked on my parents' house ... the Web site remodeling project began in the spring of 1998 and has yet to be finished! All that aside, the links from the old issues' tables of contents to articles worked, but the internal search engine did not. So if you still have your old bookmark list and want to find something, this is where you may be able to do it.

The archive also has some special collections. The current collections focus on September 11, the U.S. 1996 and 2000 elections, Web pioneers, TV and movies. You can surf these pages with or without a specific URL, but you cannot do anything like a Google search.

Have fun exploring.

http://www.archive.org/index.html

Chris Mildner

FORWARD Specials

RETURN Front Page

LAST MONTH Internet Prospector