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April 2001

Web Feet - now on-line: review

WebFeet Guides  are a series of guides to web resources - designed for libraries and built round the proven concept of authoritative, annotated bibliography. They have the sort of features any good bibliography should have

Priced at $495 for schools of under 1,000 enrollment and for public libraries serving populations of less than 10,000. www.webfeetguides.com

- subject based organisation, helpful annotations and a variety of media options - Printed, Marc records and now an On-line version powered by epixtech Library Services Inc's iPAC. This latest offering allows libraries to offer the service to their clients without having to worry about the loading of records onto their own local system. Peter Evans reviews:

Main Sections

[Biblio Tech Review]
[Archive Issues]
[Technical Briefings]
[Supplier Directory]
[Exhibitions]
[Archive Reviews]
[About BTR]

Contents

Coverage, Authority, Language, Search features, Navigation, Display, Additional services, Help, Other site services, Problems, Conclusions

This Month’s Stories

In a way this is as much a review of iPAC as it is of Web Feet since the features of iPAC govern the access and use that can be made of the Web Feet content.

Top Coverage

The coverage of Web Feet guides is well described on their web site www.webfeetguides.com - they are aimed at the high school, public and lower level academic libraries. There is a separate guide for the K-12 age group, which will be available, on-line in September.

As an American publication, Web Feet rightly focuses on US and (Canadian) topics and resources the extent of this can be seen from this table showing hit numbers.  The sheer number of sites originating in the USA obviously means that any such table would be biased towards US sites but here are the results anyway for those readers further afield.

Search terms General KW hits SUBJECT KW hits England 44 16 United and States 813 643 America 201 102 Great and Britain 28 23 Scotland 8 0 Ireland 11 4 France 57 33 China 38 21 Spain 21 12 Hispanic 17 14

More unexpected is the lack of coverage of Spanish language sites- although there are plenty of sites covering the US Hispanic issues in English.  Web Feet are planning a Spanish version for 2002. They will be translating some of the supersites from the core collections into Spanish, but more importantly, will be working with Spanish-speaking librarians to do the Web research and annotating to create the bulk of the content.

Authority

The sites are reviewed by a mixture of librarians and educators and give a good indicative review of the site and its key features.

Language

epixtech's iPAC can have "skins" which wrap the site in a specific language - but I could not find much foreign language material and you cannot filter by language of site - a major handicap for anyone searching for material in their mother tongue or language of study.  The information is often given in the notes but not indexed by the general keyword search. Most useful would be the inclusion of the language in a separate field and its adding to the filters.

Top Search features

iPAC is a good choice of search engine.  It is easy to use and has well thought out search interface with the features of a good OPAC. The iPAC engine coupled with the MARC 21 database format provides the user with features that you would die for in a general web search engine once the usual keyword index has produced a million hits or so.

The default search is the general keyword but subject keyword (searching LC subject headings), Web Title, Author/sponsor provide valuable ways of accessing by keyword. Additional search options give you adjacency, proximity and Boolean AND, OR, NOT logic as well.

In addition to the keyword indexes are several useful browse indexes through Subject headings, authors, LC and Dewey call (class) numbers and Web site title.  Once you are at a full entry for a site, you can hyperlink to the subject listing but not, rather perversely, via the LC or Dewey call numbers - which would be a useful additional function.

Retrieved sets of records are presented in 15 - 30 hit chunks, which can be varied by the user.  Results can also be sorted by date Author, Subject, Title and number of matches - giving a kid of relevance ranking. Filtering is not available yet - although the general text on the search pages and help indicate that it is - this illustrates problem with borrowing, but not fully customising a search engine.  A language filter would be the most useful addition - together with audience level.  Date would be an irrelevant filter on most web sites.

Navigation

Navigating around the search results is generally good - you can do most things you need to easily and quickly - for example being able to step through the hits at the detailed level without returning to the hit list each time.

Display

The display of hits and the layout of the records are clear and well labelled with hyperlinks to extend the search via subject heading (but sadly not call number).  I would have liked to see the URL link to the site itself, which is neatly wrapped in a Web Feet frame, open in a separate window as the help pages do - so that the user can maintain contact with the search whilst browsing the resources themselves.

Top Additional services

There are several additional services that can be used once references are identified - these services are again, what any good OPAC should be offering, viz. a shopping cart feature for assembling a "webography" and a mailto option for these items - in standard or delimited format for loading into personal bibliographic software.

There is also a useful automatic list of previous searches maintained so those searches can be easily re-run.

One for the future might be an alerting service to allow users to personalise the site and send emails when new sites or topics were added to the database.

Help

The help is generally very good and detailed and presented in a separate window - but it does cover some features of iPAC that might not be available to the Web Feet version e.g. on the main screen ISBN searches are mentioned but not available.

Other site services

There are some other services linked from the top frame of the site: Calendar Connections is a well-intentioned automatic search for sites related to a specific month - but I found hardly useful. "New Topics" sounds very useful but has no hyperlinks to the new headings displayed.

Problems

Overall, things worked very well on what is obviously an early version of the site.  There were a few odd things that I am sure will be ironed out soon. There are a few unlabelled buttons and boxes at bottom of the expanded search option.  Occasionally the "My Web Feet" - list disappeared when re-sizing the browser (Netscape 4.7) window.

Top Conclusions

Web Feet guides have proven their worth to many US education institutions. It would be nice if their excellent format were extended into other geographic areas - via franchises or partnerships perhaps - and some additional metadata added (e.g. language, audience level) to the MARC 21 records to allow filtering.

The iPAC search engine is generally excellent but needs some work to customise out any unused OPAC features and help text which can confuse and I would prefer a separate widow to display the linked web page.

[2001]
[Sirsi buys DRA]
[Swets/SFX]
[Sirsi latest sales]
[Web Feet]
[Ex-Libris win Melvyl]
[Endeavor - Australia]
[FDI win EEF]
[TLC/CARL]
[Inmagic Relevance]
[BTR printable trial]

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