Director of the Garfield Library in Brunswick, New York, and author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for August 1998
You may think catalog cards are a thing of the past. However, when I put out an online call for favorite digital tools, no fewer than three people wrote to tell me the wonderful ways these anachronisms can be put to use. Christine Drew, coordinator of library user services at St. Norbert College Library in De Pere, Wisconsin, says that a catalog card is her "favorite tool for getting those itty-bitty jammed bits of paper out of the laser printer!"
Judy E. Myers, assistant to the dean of libraries at the University of Houston, told me that two catalog cards can be used to retrieve CDs from 5.25-inch drives: "Slip one above the disc and one below, and bend the two cards a bit to grip the disc while you ease it out." I guess that's one anachronism bailing out another. . . .
Beyond the joys of ancient technologies, HTML editors were the next-most-popular tool among my respondees.
Web-writing aficionados fall into two camps: the ardent minority who prefer tagging editors, where they can see the code they are editing, and the vast majority who like the totally "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) editors.
If you remember WordPerfect 5.1, which allowed you to turn on "reveal codes" to peek under the hood at the invisible commands formatting the word-processing document, you know what a tagging editor is like. (Most of these editors also allow you to display the code through a browser.) Even more important from an accessibility perspective, tagging editors give writers a lot of control over how the page is constructed—an issue cited by several librarians.
Anne Prestamo, reference librarian at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, says HotDog "lets the user specify what version of the HTML standard they wish to conform to"—a point echoed by Amy Helfman, Judaica librarian at Hebrew Union College in New York City, who cited the need to write her pages from a "conservative" perspective so the vast majority of browsers could display what she writes. (The World Wide Web Consortium has written accessibility guidelines, and online tools such as Bobby can help you check your code.)
Arachnophilia and Brooklyn North's HTML Assistant (the demoware version) are two favorite free-tagging editors, while Hot Dog Pro and Homesite received votes as low-cost, high-quality tools. Walter Minkel of Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, loves Arachnophilia's ease of use (great for training staff), while fans of HTML Assistant appreciate how it speeds up the tagging process.
Both Hot Dog and Homesite support style sheets, the tools in HTML 4.0 that allow application of consistent style across Web sites. I like the way Homesite completes tags that I've started (great for librarians doing six things at once out on a public desk with a jangling phone) and includes a built-in validation tool for checking the accuracy of the code.
Fans of Microsoft's Front Page and similar tools such as Pagemill—and they are legion—include Julie James, Internet services librarian at Kansas City Public Library. Julie likes the way she can check and fix links without even opening a document, and several people cited Front Page's sophisticated abilities to manage entire sites. When I ran a couple of library Web sites created in Front Page and Pagemill through Bobby's accessibility validator, however, Bobby returned them with many errors, while pages created with tagging editors received much better ratings. WYSIWYG editors easily produce attractive sites and have powerful management tools—but before you publish your work, you might want to run the pages through validators to ensure that everyone you're trying to serve will be able to view your message.
In addition to his favorite tagging editor, Arachnophilia, Minkel loves his digital camera and Photoshop, a nice if pricey graphics software that came with his scanner. The three tools together allow him to quickly create lively resources. Check out the kids' pages at Multnomah's Web site!
Sometimes the most modest tools have ardent fans. Roy Lewis of the Northeast Texas Library System and Michael Reagan, Internet database librarian at California State University/Northridge, like WS_FTP, a Windows-based FTP tool. I too use this reliable workhorse for uploading files to Web sites. It's lightweight, inexpensive, available in versions for Windows 3.1 and 95, and has all kinds of neato features such as name-changing on the fly and the ability to instantly create and modify directories on your remote site. To browse for this and other tools, visit the Tucows Web site.
Then there are two programs that are a little hard to describe. Recently, I had about two hours to pull together a bibliography on library buildings for my board. "Sure, no problem," I panted, and turned to Endnote, which is a portmanteau software program combining a Z39.50 client with the ability to create and manipulate bibliographies in a variety of formats, including MARC and HTML (it has good search capabilities, too). Think Swiss army knife for writers and reference librarians. Though I had never used Endnote, in a few minutes I was connecting to remote catalogs through its front end, vacuuming up citations left and right, giving them a tidy once-over, and then producing a neatly formatted bibliography.
Michael J. Perkins of San Diego State University's Love Library cast his vote for a similar tool—BookWhere2000, a Z39.50 client and bibliography program. It's hard to explain just how nifty these tools are. At around $300 a copy, they should be nifty, but I've paid a lot more for a lot less. Except, of course, for catalog cards—they're worth their weight in gold!