[WEB4LIB] Re: link annotations

[Karen Harker]

We tried this trick, ourselves, but ran up against 2 problems:
1) Some of our annotations included HTML formatting and/or links. This caused disruption in the display of the remainder of the page.
2) While in IE, the annotation appears as a tiny yellow box, in Netscape it only appears in the status bar at the bottom of the page. This location is not that obvious and can be missed by users, and it is too short to display the entire message.

Given these problems, we still display annotations ("descriptions"), although we try to keep them succinct.  However, a longer, more in-depth description could improve keyword searching, especially given the specificity of most of the searches on our site.  This specificity renders our broad subject assignments ineffective. So we add more details in a separate "LongDescription" field.  This way, a user who enters "forensic psychology" would retreive "Psychology Research on the Net", a site which has a major section on this subspecialty.

In other words, while the annotations may not necessarily be read by users, they can be used as "access points" to these sites.



Karen R. Harker, MLS
UT Southwestern Medical Library
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX  75390-9049
214-648-1698
http://www.swmed.edu/library/

>>> Tara Calishain <calumet at Mindspring.com> 7/25/01 9:29:49 PM >>>
At 12:56 PM 7/25/2001, Martin, Julie wrote:
>We've got some debate going on about the value of providing annotations 
>for the resources we link to on our library web site. We link to a large 
>number of databases, newsletters, electronic journals, and web sites 
>relevant to our company.
>
>We're in the process of a redesign and there are strong feelings on both 
>sides of this issue. Some people feel the annotations are unecessary, and 
>that after you've used a resource once they just clutter things up. 
>Other's feel that librarians add value by providing some descriptive 
>information about the resource and what it's unique features are. In 
>addition some of our site-licensed publications have access information 
>users need to login, session limits, etc, that users need to be aware of. 
>Some of this could be provided via a link to an information page.
>
>Personally, I prefer to know what a link is before I follow it, especially 
>if there are a large number to choose from. But I'm probably too close to 
>the issue here, and would like to get some objective feedback.
>If anyone has information on usability studies that address this issue I'd 
>be interested in seeing those as well.

I think annotations are incredibly important, and make a list much more 
useful than it would
be if it were just links. If there's a design issue, perhaps you could put 
the descriptions in a
title link (so the descriptions show up in the status bar) or as the ALT 
text on a small, quick-loading
image like a bullet.

Tara



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