Northern Light (http://www.nlsearch.com/) seems to be the favored search engine.
Askjeeves seems to be getting popular.
eBLAST seems to be popular.
Many comments about amazon.com
There are two parts of the company, Internet Archive is the nonprofit part; Alexa is the for profit part. Alexa Internet "crawls" the Web every six to eight weeks and donates a copy of each Web "crawl" to the Internet Archive at The Library of Congress for research purposes and for posterity. There is no navigation in the archive; it's useful for studying usage paths. Eblast's "Site Info" comes from Alexa. Alexa has partnered with Netscape.The new Netscape has a "What's Related" button that goes to Alexa data. In the future, there will be a back point for "who points to my site?" Not available yet. Use your usage data to customize content; move up front what people are interested in (our Registrar's Office does that). Alexa is ad supported.
Metadata is a type of cataloging; describe an object or collections of objects in a structured way. It's data about data. It's a structured description -- title, author. We're making it up as we go along. There are different types of metadata -- descriptive, administrative (purpose, filesize), structural (which page follow which). See the Ebind project (http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Ebind/docs/), for example -- the diary.
What elements do you capture? Object level vs. collection level. Key question: What's the least you can get by with? Basic elements: Dublin Core (still emerging, for example, what is the format for author -- "last, first" ?). Structural and Administrative -- Making of America II (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/moa2), Library of Congress, American Memory (http://marvel.loc.gov). Browse there; amazing what they are doing.
Northern Light attempts to serve librarians. Librarians want quality and relevance. Knowing relevancy ranking is food for spammers. Hotbot is good for popular items, for example, search for taxes. But it's weak for unique searches; weak for new, ermerging sites. AltaVista will refine searchers. Northern Light is good for journals. Northern Light classifies by subject, type, source, and language. Sorts query results into folders; folders represent themes. Providing more words helps. If it finds all the words in the title, that goes to the top. If it finds all the words in the text, that's a good hit. Example: search for "diagnostic tests". Backup. Select tab: Industry Search. Now search for "diagnostic tests". Do again selecting Healthcare. Northern Light has good visuals and is self-explanatory.
html mixes structure and presentation. Misuses are common (for example, h6 for small font). XML (eXtensible Markup Language) uses more meaningful tags, like <author> instead of <b> and <title> instead of <i>. It facilitates presentation for visually impaired. Can provide more info for search engines. Dynamic html is not standard, XML is.
Bryan Davidson, Univ. Arkansas
http://www.uark.edu/libinfo/etext_html/brytemp/presentation.htm
Frames. Can have static menu items. Provides a feeling of security; users know what site they are in. Can't bookmark easily. Use for form: instructions on one side, fill-in form on the other side. Always specify a target, for example, target-_top. Bryan showed how easy it is to put the home page for Amazon next to Barnes and Noble.
Encouraged us to learn to use new tools. New interfaces coming; user control over interaction with information.
Web Sites Mentioned:
http://www.magnifi.com (track pictures and multi-object display)
http://www.excalibur.com (multi-object display)
Streaming news: http://www.rtinews.com (Retrieval Technologies)
http://www.dailydiffs.com (change monitoring for content domains)
http://www.ingetech.com (test tracking up to 20 URLs free)
http://www.muscat.co.uk (new version of Dialog)
Cartia's Overview Map: http://www.cartia.com (themescapes interface)
Metasearch engine: http://www.askjeeves.com
If "online" is the answer, what is the question?
Concerns about research, search engines, amateurs vs. specialists, costs of journals and publication issues. Free vs. fee. Things that are "apparently" free but are paid for by expensive licenses -- show "paid for by your public library." Needs for retraining for librarians. Metadata as cataloging.
Liked Northern Light.
InfoSeek gives good descriptions.
Excite has concept searching, phrase searching, more-like-this
Hotbot just bought by Lycos. Popular stuff good; not so good on research.
AltaVista good on foreign languages and domain limits.
For metasearching: InFind - Interence Find.
Doesn't use Lycos any more.
Sherlock (MacOS8.5) can search your harddisk.
Infoseek Express integrates hits
Clever -- find high-quality info, cuts out garbage -- new, www.almaden.ibm.com/ -- search for clever.
Direct hit
AskJeeves, Daily Diffs
Nicole Hennig, Bose Corporation http://www.hennigweb.com/presentations/il98/
Hytelnet 1990, abandoned 1997, still useful, library.usask.ca/hytelnet
webCATS indexes web-based OPACS, http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat
index web-based OPACS. Look at vendor index.
LIBDEX new in 1997; index library home pages and OPACS.
Started with SQL, expanding with XML.
Will index every library in the world.
Servers: www.lights.com/freenet -- community networks; http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat/vhp.html -- Vendor Home pages
Resources: javascript html editors
online graphics creators: webfx, cooltext.com
URL redirectors: window.to/libdex, visitweb.com
in frames and has ads on bottom
Software: use vi or pico. Free html editors. Doesn't like FrontPage. Horrible, but uses it.
Buttonz & Tilez! (found at http://www.doremi.net/freeware/Graphics_Utilities.htm) is a software package that should make the life of webmasters easier.The package includes 2 applications, "Buttonz!", which creates buttons of various shapes, and "Tilez!", which renders seamless textures.