VT DLI2: DL4U
Digital Libraries for Users

Quality of Online Information Resources

Annotated Partial Bibliography

Bearman, David, and Jennifer Trant. "Authenticity of Digital Resources: Towards a Statement of Requirements in the Research Process," D-Lib Magazine, June 1998. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/06bearman.html

Though this article really deals with authenticating digital images, is very applicable to "rating" other digital works. Great references too.

Carpenter, Leona, Simon Shaw, Adrew Prescott, eds. Towards the Digital LIbrary: The Brityish Library's Initaitives for Access Programme. London: British Library, 1998

Heckart, Ronald J. "Machine Help and Human Help in the Emerging Digital Library," College & Research Libraries, 59 (May 1998): 250-259.

Some notes: ..."the aim is to maximize unmediated access to information resources." It specualtes "what user self-sufficiency might be like in the DL of the future, to examine the implications of the change for the profession, and to posit some policy alternatives." "Intelligent agents, complex programs of structured information that can be queried...represented as persons and sometimes are difficult to distinguish from avatars." "...the process of creating online help files is iteself increasingly automated, as are cataloging and indexing fucntions, the ultimate goal being a seamless meshing of help, indexing, and data in "intelligent" information delivery systems." "keep an open mind and a watchful eye...if machine help is judged with this broader mix of values, it still may be found "good enough" from a policy standpoint. It may not need to be as good as, or better than, human help....Perhaps benchmarks could be developed so that as machine help met successively more stringent sets of criteria, human help could be curtailed correspondingly until such time as machine help reached the limit of its capacity. Perhaps that capacity is so great that human help would disappear, but perhaps not."

Lynch, Clifford. "Searching the Internet," Scientific American, 276 (Mar. 1997): 52-56.

Some notes: two levels of indexing--one by skilled indexers and reviewers for the highest quality now associated with academic library collections, the other level would be computer generated like the I'net search engines produce. Former might be fee-based and the later might be supported by advertising.

Schwartz, Candy, and Mark Rorvig, eds. Digital Collections: Implications for Users, Funders, Developers and Maintainers. ASIS: Proceedings fo the 69th ASIS Annual Meeting, vol. 34 (1997)

Sowards, Steven W. "A Typology for Ready Reference Web Sites in Libraries," First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_5/sowards/index.html

Uses questions to determine guage the potential utility of a Web site. Describes "elements in a typology" including depth and organizational criteria. Combines these characteristics for a dozen distinct elements.