I'd also be interested in hearing about Infoseeek Express, since it isn't
available for a Mac, which is what I've got (not very customer-friendly for
them to only mention this at the end of a long page of promotional hype)
I also was thinking about the Alta Vista Europe site, and the problems
highlighted by Karen. Now that UK universities are being charged for access
to transatlantic sites, we're being encouraged to use sites nearer to home:
but I'm not going to recommend my students to use a search engine that's
duff, so I'll probably refer them to the US site or another engine.
Do any of the others of you in UK academia think it's worth asking CHEST
(or do I mean JISC?) to point out the problems on behalf of the academic
community? I would have thought that Digital might well be concerned about
its image with future purchasers of its products (students and staff), and
also its standing in the hits-rating (if academic users were advised to
steer clear of a site because it wasn't working properly). Advertisers do
seem to see students and academics as worthwhile markets, so that ought to
be a consideration for search engine providers.
JISC has concerned itself with priced content sites. However, I am
increasingly using sites in my teaching which you don't have to pay to
enter (search engines, conference papers, company sites, international news
sites etc.). (as a side note, sometimes the whole POINT is that they aren't
in the UK, since I'm trying to get students to look at e.g. the different
way a company presents itself in different countries, or how a news story
is presented in different countries - and most students can't read foreign
languages)
Does anyone see any mileage in floating the idea to JISC that it ought to
concern itself with search engines, or is this just a mad idea brought on
by the proximity of the new academic year? There's no financial
negotiation, but JISC could have more clout in its representations than
some information/library bodies, I would think.
Since JISC's aim is 'To stimulate and enable the cost effective
exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national
network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils
communities' and they have a committee on Electronic Information 'whose aim
is to build a distributed national electronic resource (DNER) and ensure
wide access to, and exploitation of, electronic information resources.'
you'd have thought they ought to take an interest. I would be willing to
lay a small bet that staff and students are using search engines more than
paid-for electronic journals.
____________________________________________
Sheila Webber, Lecturer
Department of Information Science, University of Strathclyde, Livingstone
Tower, Glasgow G1 1XH, UK.
Tel + 44 (0)141 548 3092, fax +44 (0)141 553 1393, Email:
[log in to unmask]
Business information sources on the internet:
http://www.dis.strath.ac.uk/business/
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