LISNews: Librarian News

Philip Keane writes \"Dear colleagues

I\'m preparing a paper on getting your library users to move to using your intranet pages.

We\'re a Medical Library serving both clinicians and research staff, and have many links to electronic journals, OVID Medline, specialised lists of websites relevant to areas served by the institution.

I\'d be interested to hear from other librarians on lisnews on their experiences and their approaches to stimulating use of intranet-delivered information services.

My contact details are as follows:

Philip J Keane,
Head, Library & Educational Information Services,
Royal Adelaide Hospital-IMVS Library,
Institute of Medical & Veterinary Science,
PO Box 14, Rundle Mall SA 5000
Phone 08 8222 3224
Fax 08 8222 3152
Mobile 0418 301 529

Email:
Philip.Keane@imvs.sa.gov.au
\"

Someone wrote in with this.

With the advent of so many electronic resources in public libraries, the role of non-print media in the collection is often overlooked. Our limited resouces are often divided between electronic and paper resources. Yet, in looking at my own libraries circulation statistics, a great deal of our circulation is in the form of non-print media.

Non-print media is also frought with conflict. Public libraries, who have no problem buying bestsellers in paper, veer away from top media titles.

It seems like we have just enough media to pacify the community without any attempt at being proactive in this area.\"
What do you think?

Charles Greenberg writes
\"I\'m one of those librarians that doesn\'t have enough to
do already and has wondered why populist sentiment for
software inadequacies (bad design) couldn\'t be harnessed and
aggregated to actually help consumers identify the simplest
and most usable programs. I decided Y2K might be the year
that a community of software raters could be found to launch
this, so I started techsimple.com

I do this on my own time with my own home resources, but I
believe there will be eventual benefit for librarians that
want an idea of what programs are simplest to use in a
number of categories, or they may want to refer library
users to my site.

I just started this site and need populist participation.
Librarians and educational technologists who have studied
usability and design will recognize that my rating survey
for each program is based on Jakob Nielsen\'s useit.com usability
heuristics for software design. Privacy for all individual
ratings and identities is maintained, and I don\'t see why a
rater couldn\'t have the application being rated open at the
same time they complete the survey.

I would appreciate feedback and