[WEB4LIB] Re: link annotations

[Charlie Crawford]

I cast a big vote for annotations. I think our annotated subject 
directory is a very useful part of our site. The focus and intent of 
this directory is to support the classes taught at our college, so it is 
very local. I agree that annotations are doubly useful because they 
provide access points for searching the directory. We try to "sell" our 
selected sites to students as a starting point before they go to the 
search engines or search directories. We had been maintaining this as 
separate subject pages and using Index Server to get at the content, but 
this was getting to be way too fussy to maintain, so we're converting to 
an Access database on the back end and ASP pages (created with 
Dreamweaver Ultradev) on the front end. So far so good.

Charlie Crawford
Tacoma Community College
http://www.tacoma.ctc.edu/library

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karen Harker" <Karen.Harker at UTSouthwestern.edu>
Date: Thursday, July 26, 2001 6:31 am
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: link annotations

> 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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