Comments on: About those awful websites

By: bettylouspence, MLIS

bettylouspence, MLIS — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:05:02 +0000

Excellent post RP! I agree completely.

By: RP

RP — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:36:27 +0000

Dan, the ALA website was the first one I checked out when I began my broad library advocacy work this past Spring. I encountered a maze of links to other ALA websites, each containing loads of outdated, overly bureaucratic and irrelevant content and 404 errors. It was a big disappointment, particularly as a first experience with librarianship writ large.

My time with Privacy Revolution was not well spent. It provided no learning or resources to me and I had to slog through a tedious online experience to verify its lack of value. The same is true for OCLC’s Geek the Library. GtL is a better technical implementation, but basically it’s all sizzle and no steak.

My concern for libraries is that these sophomoric projects have been produced with significant grants (from George Soros and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, respectively). Why give money to libraries when leading organizations make clear they have absolutely no idea what to do with it?

By: Dan Kleinman

Dan Kleinman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:14:54 +0000

The ALA’s new main site is a disaster too because it broke almost all hyperlinks to the old site. There must be thousands of links out there to the ALA and its new web site broke them all (except top level ones). No redirects were ever written. I tried to help by advising them of this but nothing was ever done. Click my name to see my blog post on this topic if you wish.

And I had the same feeling when I looked at the new privacy site. You write it up so well.

What may make this worse is that George Soros gave $350,000 to the ALA to address the privacy issue, and if this site is the result of part of that money, that would be really awful. See http://safelibraries.blogspot.com/2008/05/soros-ala-and-terrorists.html