Ian Winship and Alison McNab
The Students Guide to the Internet
Library Association Publishing, 1996. ISBN 1 85604 207 3
Price: £6.99
Review by Isobel Stark
Yet another Internet book, but for a change this book has a specific market in mind: namely students in UK Higher Education. The book is published by The Library Association with the support of JISC, and the price, £6.99 has been kept deliberately low so that students can afford to buy it. The authors themselves are both academic librarians and must have had much experience in dealing with the student species, in all it varied forms. This experience certainly comes across in the scope and emphasis of the book.
The chapters themselves take the reader through from 'What is the Internet?', including the useful and realistic 'What you will and won't find on the Internet', via searching and finding information for coursework and jobs, travel etc. citing electronic sources, keeping up with new resources to creating you own web pages. However how do you encompass so much in such a small book? The huge variety of students interests, subjects, abilities and facilities does present significant handicaps. As soon as technical details arise, or subscription services are mentioned, the book has to advise 'ask your library or computer services'.
The book has to occupy that uneasy ground where it has to reach both the na¸ve user and the computer literate (and even the self-taught Internet literate) all of whom will be using different computing facilities. The book cannot answer the basic "Where do I find Telnet on my computer" and yet it attempts to teach some Telnet commands. Not an altogether successful combination, which I feel might scare off or confuse the na¸ve or unconfident user.
This is certainly a book to be used in conjunction with other books and locally produced guides, as the book itself often suggests. A user would not be able to expertly use any of the programs or resources mentioned in the book without consulting other help material. For example, in the chapter, 'How to create your own Web page', the HEAD element is mentioned but never shown or properly described.
Several other niggles arise:
...are funded or subsidized by the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee - see
http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/).
The majority of these services require you to register ....
If you can, test your pages with different browsers and different versions, to see that they display as you intend. For example, Lynx displays italic text as if it were a link- a link in what? Not even all graphical browsers underline links, and most lynx set-ups I have seen have the links bolded or in negative.
However as an overall guide, the book covers most subject and interest areas, information about the most respected and stable resources on various topics. The tables, on types of Internet resource included by multidisciplinary subject collections and the features of Internet search services, are particularly useful. It givers basic advice on how to find information in a clear and common sense manner. However, as often with guides written by librarians for students, I feel worried that we are showing students how to find information but not what to do with it. This may not be within a librarian's remit, but it should be within someone's, and I fear at present it tends to fall between the stools of the librarian and the academic.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 14-Mar-1997