Building the Ultimate Portal: Selection Secrets of the Librarians’ Internet Index June 30, 2006
Posted by fharris in : ALA2006 , 1 comment so farOn Monday I went to hear one of my favorite thinkers, Karen Schneider, talk about her place of work, the Librarians’ Internet Index. LII is a searchable, browsable, and annotated database of high quality websites selected and evaluated by librarians. It is chock-full of features, like specialized seasonal pages. LII gets 10 million hits per month, has 16,000 e-mail subscribers, and now over 19,000 people subscribe to its RSS feed. The primary users are librarians, who use it for in-person and virtual reference and for website “collection development.” I use it in my teaching and plug it into many pathfinders as well.
Karen waxed eloquent about the benefits of RSS, a way of subscribing to the new content on a blog or regularly updated website that’s been properly coded for such feeds. She described how it took 13 years for LII to get to 16,000 e-mail subscribers and a matter of months to triple use once people started subscribing through RSS aggregators like Bloglines. LII will roll out a new search engine in late July or August which will display faceted (categorized) search results and allow tagging (collaborative bookmarking). Down the road users will be able to create RSS feeds for individual searches (so anytime LII adds a new website on, say, beekeeping, it will pop up in your RSS feed!).
Unfortunately, LII runs on soft money. The LSTA funding they’ve received through the California State Library has been cut by 50%. I’d like to see LII become a national resource. In the meantime, the 3.0 FTE employees are working on other income-generating activities — special content projects, sponsorship opportunities, and a (yay!) store. So check the site frequently to see when you can start ordering your very own LII boxer shorts.
Tag: ala2006