Unauthoried Web Pages

[Burt, David]

On Tue, 17 Dec 1996, Pamela Brown wrote:

> Does anyone have experience with someone setting up Web pages without
> authorization?  One of our member libraries wants to know if there is
> anything they can do when a local private business sets up a home page
> for them without the library's approval.  It puts the library in an
> awkward position, and the information is not wholly accurate.  Short of
> legal action, does anyone have suggestions to offer?
>

We had this problem as well.  A local "Internut" set up an crude,
sloppy, unofficial city homepage, that included the library.  The
library portion had an extremely poor scan of a photo of the library,
and the library director's name and home phone number!

His real purpose, it turned out, was to embarrass the city into putting
up an official homepage.   Once we got our homepage up, he removed his.

 The only trouble was, his dead links showed up in search engines for
months and months.  They always showed up first, before our live links,
and made finding our pages quite difficult at first.

BTW, I've discovered that search engines can have other strange,
unintended consequences.  I put lists of titles of our holdings of
videotapes, audiobooks, and periodical titles on our homepage.  After a
few months, I started getting inquires about this audio or that
videotape, from people in North Carolina, Finland, California, Sweden,
you name it.  I get about one per week.  This is all because they enter
the title of a tape or magazine into one of the Search Engines,  and get
our periodical or video list as a hit.


#########################################################
#	David Burt, Information Technology Librarian                        #
#	The Lake Oswego Public Library
      #
#	706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego, OR 97034                            #
#	URL:	http://www.ci.oswego.or.us/library/library.htm      #
#	Phone:	(503) 635-0392
               #
#	Fax: 	(503) 635-4171
              #
#	E-mail: 	dburt at ci.oswego.or.us
       #
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