It’s getting to the end of the conference. I’m exhausted. Rita Vine’s presentation was the only one I attended dealing specifically with search engines. (I’m not counting this morning’s keynote as it had no competition.) Her opening comment that we’re good at evaluating search results but not the engines or tool themselves is a very important one. Here’s her five-step evaluation process:
Find new search tools
Figure out the business model
Evaluate the functionality
Evaluate the content’s quality and comprehensiveness
Compare to other best-of-breed tools
She mentioned using WHOIS to find the parent companies when looking for business model information. Those who attended my bookmarklets cybertour will know how to do that using CoolWhoIs.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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