anatomy of a netscam -Reply

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

John Hogle summarized my thoughts on this issue.  I'd add that this
points up once again the problems with relying on tools created by
commercial services.  As long as we let "them" create these tools, the
tools will reflect market forces and not the users' best interests.  While I
use Yahoo daily, I'm aware that I'm being massaged, swayed, conditioned
and manipulated--and I'm aware, as John points out, that most users are
UNaware of this.  They see these indices as benevolent public services. 
We address this in training, but in addition to caveats we try to point
people to the few noncommercial indices, such as the Berkeley Public
Library index to the Internet.  Even better would be a resource on the
scale of Yahoo that was created by public-service librarians on behalf of
The People. 

Who would do such a project?  Well,  OCLC has a project called Netfirst,
which is currently free, but what bothers me is that it has been and later
will be a fee-based resource.  That leaves our professional associations
and the Library of Congress as key instigators of public, tax-funded
indexing projects.  GILS and other projects are interesting, but they
haven't taken off (though projects such as FedWorld are very useful
within the framework of government resources). We haven't seen any
other lead-the-fleet projects.  So what's the answer?

Karen G. Schneider/US EPA Region 2 Library/
http://www.epa.gov/Region2/html/library/
schneider.karen at epamail.epa.gov
opinions mine alone