For today's exercise we visited Rollyo (http://www.rollyo.com). I found the site cumbersome and rather frustrating to use. I wound up "looping" between the same pages several times before getting oriented to the site (given that I'm quite adept at navigating webpages, this was surprising as well as frustrating). Once I was on the librarianblogs page and searched for "privacy," I had to visit a number of the blogs before finding one that actually discussed privacy as an issue. I would have expected a more useful search engine, one that could rank my results by relevance. Having to sort through page after page by hand was an inefficient use of time.
That said, the privacy-related post I eventually found was an interesting one, discussing the OCLC's position paper on privacy and trust. I found it interesting that they commented on the fact that Web-users are now "building" the Web as they go thanks to the various social networking tools now available.
By contrast, the mashup portion of the assignment was a very interesting and diverting one. I was particularly intrigued by the Healthmap mashup (http://healthmap.org/en), an interactive, up-to-date worldwide public health map. As my institution has recently opened a School of Public Health, this is useful as well as interesting for me. It was actually the only site I retrieved when I searched for "health." Using "library" as a search term retrieved two sites, and nothing came up for "librarian." Makes me think that we health sciences librarians ought to start producing some exciting new mashups!
No comments:
Post a Comment