Notes on the Information Age

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Building an Audience

The reading for this week focuses on building an audience on the web, which is a quite a different topic than the informational resources that I am also covering here. It is, of course, very important to consider your audience when you put your materials/project online. Actually, you should begin by deciding if you are even going to have an audience, and then proceed to decide who that audience will be (and how you want to attract that audience). Those decisions are going to impact the design of your project. In most cases, for me personally, my audience is usually the enrolled students in our online courses, but I do have some projects that are not student centered for which I do have to consider the size of my audience, which is generally small.) I generally try to pay attention to META tags and other techniques that allow Google and other search engines to be able to find my work. That is all part of the building an audience task.

There were other Rosenzweig points in this week's reading. Since I do not have for-profit websites, I am less interested in questions of marketing, but almost every historical museum or site is very much encouraged with marketing. A site such as Morven Park in Leesburg is always trying to raise money, and so marketing, building an audience, with different social media tools, is very important.

While I would like to encourage substantial feedback on most of my projects, I have ruled out use of the "comment" features that you usually see on blogs or find on web pages. For me, it is just not a good vehicle for generating constructive, intelligent feedback. I can often get better feedback from a user who contacts me by email. Finally, server logs and stats, Facebook "likes," or Twitter re-tweets can be useful to give you rough numbers of people accessing your materials, and they do allow you to correlate those numbers with your ideas of audience.

Online Information Resources

Well, on the schedule for this week, I have included some links to online databases. Mostly I have done that because so few students are unaware of the kind of rich informational resources available to them through the NVCC library, especially as part of the VIVA consortium. These are some really great resources, especially selected historical newspapers, that are offered by the library.

It is not really that surprising that a lot of libraries have been at the forefront of online information technology. On one hand, this was a cost-saving feature for libraries who could pool their resources together to subscribe to online databases of materials (and not have to purchase and store hard copies of materials). Some of the earliest such library projects were article-based, such as ProQuest, Academic Search, JSTOR and Project Muse. These are great resources (BTW, there are also the historical newspapers databases there too.) On the other hand, these are also gated communities. You need some kind of password to access these materials. You must pay for access, although that is a given for most students.

As I just said, these databases are largely, closed, gated systems, but, in some cases, individual libraries and consortia have begun to go beyond the closed, gated database (I hate gated information.) and open up materials to the general public. See particularly

Here are some local history resources.

Here is some great reading for this week (and some websites to look at).

The end result of both open and gated resources is that there is just so much information available online now (but much less so for the period after 1945, and you know why). Let's just consider the Avalon Project, which we have already looked at. There is so much information available in that single project. There are literally millions of documents online.

That means that it has become an increasingly difficult task to search effectively through all of these materials to find items/information that you can use for some digital project. This is important, and it makes digital research sometimes very time consuming. Part of the problem is that no single search will find everything for you. You've got to use different search words/phrases, and usually each collection has to be searched individually. For examples, if I was looking for information related to the history of the borough of Slatington, a Google search doesn't produce much. But if I search every one of the library digital collections that I have listed in this unit (and each collection uses its own search set up), then I will find things. So, the problem has become actually identifying and finding the digital collections that might be useful to my research. I've found that to be largely a hit/miss affair.