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Title:
Find it Online - Online Information Service Provision in the Social Sciences
Review:
This book was originally listed in the FreePint Author Update as
simply "Online Information Services." This, it turns out, was a
fairly accurate description. The half of the book which deals with
setting up, marketing, and managing online information services is
very general, and could be used in any course on the subject. What
makes it specific to social sciences is the first half, dedicated to
case studies of libraries and other services serving a social service
clientele. I expect that when this book is used as a textbook,
Chapters 12 on will be assigned as class reading, with occasional
reference to the preceding eleven chapters of case studies.
For this reason, this book would be an excellent candidate for
becoming an e-book. It would be more usable with clickable links
within the text to illustrations from the case studies. The extensive
link lists in the back of the book, as well as most of the references,
would also be more useful that way. (In fact, the core chapters could
be used as a general information science text, and links could be
keyed to case studies from any specialty.) That said, this book does
not really present any usability problems as it is.
Chapters 13-22 provide good guides to topics such as management of
online services, marketing, usability, metadata, and so on. They are
effective in translating management and computer issues to
"library-ese," relating the broader subjects to their narrower library
uses gracefully. Other topics with which librarians may be more
familiar, such as selection, subject classification, and metadata, are
also dealt with clearly and succinctly. Each chapter begins with a
definition of the subject, then explains processes involved in it.
Some authors have created tables and checklists to make clear the
steps in a process or the parts of a task. Throughout the book, main
ideas are boiled down to their essence and boxed as "Top Tips". Most
of these tips don't really stand alone, but if one is leafing through
the book looking for useful ideas, they highlight such ideas for
further study.
This book should be very popular with professors teaching library
courses related to the social sciences, but it could profitably be
read by any library school student. It would also be useful to a
library planning or starting an online information service, as well as to any new staff hired for such a department.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Caryn Wesner-Early is a librarian who is contracted to the United
States Patent Office for database and Web searching.
Related Free Pint Links:
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