University of South Carolina                                                     Williams
School of Library and Info. Science                                             SLIS 748

Spring, 2007
Web Guide No. 1 is due Jan. 29
Web Guide No. 2 is due April  9

Assignment No. 6: Web/Internet Resource Guides/Pathfinders

You will prepare two Web/Internet resource guides as part of the requirements for the course. (These are sometimes also called pathfinders.)

The resource guides should cover a specific subject area chosen by you. The choice of the topic to be covered is up to you but it should be in the general area of business or economics. It may or may not be specifically library related. If you have a question about whether a topic is acceptable/workable as a pathfinder, give me call/send message and I will let you you know ASAP. Generally speaking you should choose a topic that interests you and one that is not too narrow or too large.  Look at the guides constructed by students in previous classes of 748 and try to avoid those topics.  These are available for viewing on the my home page. 

The resource guide should be organized so that it follows some specific approach that is logical to that topic. If specifically using what is known as the pathfinder approach, where the purpose is to guide the user of the pathfinder through a body of literature/web resources, then it should begin with general information and lead to more specialized materials on the topic. To some extent the topic will dictate the organization of the guide but do remember that the way you organize it is important --to me and to the user. I have no set limit on the number of entries for a guide but generally it should have at least 15-20 for adequate coverage of the topic. See those guides listed on my home page for specific examples of previous work done by students--and try to avoid those topics for your guides.

In approaching the task of finding appropriate Web resources for your guide you should explore a number of avenues: other web guides on the same or related topics; search via your favorite web search engines; consultation of various print guides to the Internet and to the general area of business; talk to your colleagues; other approaches that work for you.

Each guide should contain at least the following information:

1. Title/topic/subject
2. Scope of the guide and intended audience (unless for anyone)
3. Appropriate annotations for each link, with brief explanation of what is at that site; if it is necessary to register to use that site, indicate this in you annotation
4. Your name, e-mail address (if you are comfortable with doing this), date constructed

The guide should be written in html format and all hyperlinks in the guide should be active links (and checked out by you to make sure they are). You may use some appropriate graphical devices (pictures, background, arrows, dots, etc. but do not get carried away--and make sure they are not copyrighted graphics. Turn in a regular print-out (printed from your Web browser) of the guide and e-mail (directly to me) as an attachment the electronic html version of the guide. See specific guidelines below.

WEB PAGE TIPS FOR SLIS748 WEB GUIDES

1. Do not name your web page index or default or anything vaguely like what a word processing package or html package would name a default file.  I prefer that you use your last name as the file name(s).

2. No spaces between words in the name of your page/guide, your links or your gifs/jpegs. Keep the names of things moderately short (remember the old no more than 8 characters requirement of DOS).

3. Do not include include anything else on the e-mail attachment that you send to me that is not a part of your web page/guide. However, do make sure that any images are included (if not embedded in the guide) in the attachment.  

4. Avoid using a light background with light font. They are impossible to read on a web page.

5. Do not name your GIF/jpeg images anything generic, such as Image1.gif, Image2.gif etc. Use a specific name such as bricks.gif, moneybag.gif etc.

6. Check out your pathfinder in both Netscape and MS Internet Explorer to make sure it looks and works fine in both browsers.  Make sure you have the complete URL in each of your links (e.g., http://etc.) and there are no references to the drives (a:, c:, etc.) on your computer as part of the URL. If you are a novice (as I am) at building Web pages you may want to consider using Netscape Composer (comes with Netscape when you download it free) or the new Sea Monkey from Mozilla (see Mozilla home page for details). 

I would like your permission to place these guides on my Web site and I encourage you to also place them on your home page.  All reproduction/permission rights are retained by you. (The school provides free computer space for students to have their own home pages; contact Liz Qunell for details.)