BUILDING A QUICK AND DIRTY EXPERT SUBJECT PAGE

Sometimes you have to become a subject expert fast -- or at least learn enough fast enough to fake it. When my university would announce new degree programs, I would have to build reference pages with a good set of basic links for them on my library's web site. Now, as an internet trainer, I create a web page for each presentation I do, complete with the outline of my talk and relevant links. So, how do you do it?

The first trick is knowing what kinds of resources to look for. This will vary with the topic, but I know I'm going to look for appropriate reference web sites regardless of the subject. I'll be looking for glossaries, dictionaries, directories, FAQ files, statistical sources, biographical sources, chronologies, calendars of events, and possibly maps and image sources. For sure, I'm going to want to find a few excellent comprehensive, expert web directories for the subject area, such as SciEd, for example (http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/scied/science.html), and any specialized search engines for that field, such as SciSeek (http://www.sciseek.com/). I'll look for relevant professional and research organizations, such as the American Psychological Association or the American Heart Association, which often provide basic guides to important web resources.

I'm going to want to link in good histories or backgrounders for the subject. If the page involves an academic discipline or a profession, I'll also want to include career information for that subject area -- educational programs, continuing education, certification and licensing information, professional organizations, and job listings. I also want to link in lesson plan guides, which I can find by way of the Ask ERIC Lesson Plan collection (http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/Lessons/). If the field has a code of ethics, I want to include that as well -- I always want to remind people that information has an ethical dimension.

If the page involves a topical issue -- gun control, say -- I'll want to include links to advocacy organizations, relevant laws and statistics, public opinion data, and a variety of viewpoints; I often link in Policy.com (http://www.speakout.com/activism/policy/) because it provides extensive background, policy information, and multiple viewpoints on many current hot issues.

I'll also include links to whatever online databases my users have access to -- EbscoHost, or FirstSearch or whatever. If you don't have any licensed databases, you can link in MagPortal (http://www.MagPortal.com/) or FindArticles (http://www.findarticles.com/PI/index.jhtml) so your users can search through free, web-based periodical articles on the subject.

If my subject is impacted by law or government, I'm going to want to include links to relevant federal and state government agencies, and to search engines like Searchgov.com (http://searchgov.com/) or virtual law libraries like Cornell's Legal Information Institute (http://www.law.cornell.edu/) so my users can find specific government documents, laws, regulations, and court decisions.

Since users often want to talk to other people online about the topic, I also want to link in listservs, bulletin boards, support groups, discussion forums, and Ask an Expert sites.

These are general strategies that guide my search regardless of the topic. But if I know nothing about the field at all, I'll start by skimming through a couple of textbooks to see how the field or topic is organized. What are the key bodies of information? What is the history of the field? What are the key theories, who are the key players, and what are the major questions being studied? Are there key documents I might want to link in (Origin of Species, Das Kapital, etc.)? Might I want to organize it by topic, or by informaton structure? What IS the information structure of the field -- the key journals, associations, indexes, bibliographies, statistical sources? (If they're available online, for free or as licensed databases like Psych Ab, I'll need to link them in.)

Once I know what I'm going to look for, how do I go about finding these sources? One of the places I start with is the Scout Report Archive (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/archives/index.html), where I can search through over 10,000 reviewed sites of substantial quality, by keyword, by Library of Congress call number (good for a broad topical search) or by LC subject headings. I will check to see if the topic is represented in About.com, because their guides (who admittedly vary in expertise) will have looked through the available web sites on that topic, selected the best ones, and organized them in a way that is logical to the field AND to the way users are looking for the information (remember that About.com's guides are routinely answering people's questions and monitoring their forums). I will look at what Librarians' Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/) and Internet Public Library (http://ipl.org/) have linked in under the topic. I'll use Google to run the search "mytopic FAQ" to find both answers to common questions and the experts and organizations who are constructing them.

Once I've found key directories to the subject, I use them to fill any holes on my page (hmm, I haven't found a jobs board yet). Back when I still had a physical reference collection, for a final check, I used to look at what it had in the subject area and ask myself if I had found equivalents for each of those tools (which admittedly is not always possible -- sometimes they don't exist on the web yet, or exist only as expensive licensed tools).

So, there you have it -- a quick and dirty expert page. (I have created pages in this manner in one day flat.) Of course you know and I know that it's not really expert, at least not yet. What I have built is simply the Internet equivalent of an opening day collection, something to start with, tinker with, and modify as I answer people's questions and realize what other kinds of resources I need to add.

* * * * * NOTE: I've had some excellent responses from students in distance education programs, which I'll relay to you soon. I haven't had any from faculty, however, and I'd be very interested in what goes into the design of distance education courses -- what techniques you use to create the sense of classroom community and elicit discussion from all your students, what you do to facilitate research for students deprived of a university library. Hope I hear from one of you.

* * * * *

COOL QUOTE

In the past, even information professionals would accustom themselves to accept the limits of their own collections, or other immediately accessible ones (like the nearest university library) as the limits of their responsibilities for seeking truth.

Barbara Quint. Information Today, April, 1999

All small libraries from whatever caste should look on online technology as the Great Equalizer, rewarding talent and creativity over institutional investment.

Barbara Quint. Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1988.

* * * * *

You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.