vol. 1, #1, March 14, 1999.

Introduction to This E-Zine * * * * What IS Information? * * * * the Government is Online

Marylaine Block Becomes the "Librarian without Walls"

As of the end of June, I will be leaving St. Ambrose University, and the security of a regular paycheck, to venture out on my own. Many of you know me already as the creator of Best Information on the Net (BIOTN), which my colleagues will carry on. Some of you know me as well as the creator of BookBytes, which moves with me to this server.

And some of you know me as a writer, author of the weekly column My Word's Worth, and a bi-weekly column on Fox News Online called Observing Us. (Some of you, of course, have never heard of me at all. Hey, you don't know what you've been missing.)

From all of this you will have gathered that working a 40 hour week has started to seriously interfere with my life.

So what I'm gonna do, I think, is make myself available for hire as an internet trainer, and spend the rest of my time writing and trying to get my columns past the print barrier.

But in the true spirit of the internet, I'm giving away free samples of my work right here. There are some things I know and can share with you about how to search and find things on the net, and how to start building your own personal web reference collection. I also know where a whole lot of really good sites are to be found on the net, and I'll tell you from time to time about my favorites on particular topics.

For those of you who are used to checking out my Neat New Stuff I Found This Week, I'll keep that going and move that here as well.

I'll also answer any of your questions that I can, and maybe farm the rest out to some of my friends who are experts on the net--a kind of Ask a Guru service. Jenny Levine, of Jenny's Librarians' Site du Jour, suggests that I might interview some of the librarian pioneers on the net, and I agree that that would be both interesting and something I'd enjoy doing myself. It's always nice to get to meet your heroes.

And I'll be sharing with you from time to time some musings about where we're going with this internet stuff, how it's going to change our print culture, how it's going to affect libraries, and how libraries and librarians are going to change the net.

If this sounds interesting to you, I hope you'll stop by each week. But I'll also keep the older issues on file.

Steve Talbott's Challenge

Steve Talbott, os NetFuture, has a challenge he regularly presents to librarians and information specialists, a challenge he says tends to produce start silence and blank stares. "What," he asks, "IS information?"

My first, somewhat cynical reaction was: Information is whatever evidence you need to continue believing what you already o believe or do what you intended to do in the first place. (I have been around students too long, I fear.)

On a more rational note, I think it's easier to explain what constitutes high quality information than it is to define info itself. See my selection policy for web sites at http://www.sau.edu/cwis/internet/wild/collect.htm

But I think you could define it this way: bits of knowledge, observation, and experience become information at the time you need them to make decisions. This could include the look of the road, that tells an experienced driver from the midwest that it is covered with a dangerous thin veneer of ice; it could include knowing that giving your kid aspirin to treat a fever can cause Reye's syndrome; it could include the reams of historical data on the effects of aerial bombing in war that helps you decide whether it's really a strategically useful tactic (and if so, in the short run or long run or both). It could be a rundown of all tax court cases relevant to your particular tax situation.

Or, of course, it could include any data that supports what you already wanted to believe anyway. (Just because a statement is cynical doesn't mean it ain't true.)

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RE:searching, Part One: Clever Government Tricks

Basic rule: use the net for what the net does better than anyone else. And if the government gathered it, passed it, ruled it, or created it, I guarantee you, the net's gonna have it.

One of the great untold stories of government that the press didn't have time to tell us when they had Monica stories to follow is that the federal government is totally online: laws, manuals, handbooks, statistics, court cases, code of federal regulations, NIH clinical trials, US Fish and Wild Life Service pamphlets, nutrition info, instructions on how to get weeds out of your lawn, you name it. It's all there.

My favorite ways of finding it:

  1. FedStats--one-stop shopping for any statistics collected by the government.
  2. GovBot--a search engine that ONLY searches government sites.
  3. GPO Gate--has a user friendly topical guide and keyword search capability
  4. US Government Ready Reference Government Documents Collection

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