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Jack Solock, Special Librarian May 1996 Welcome to the End User's Corner. I'm Jack Solock and I'm a Special Librarian with InterNIC Net Scout Services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My background is in History, Agricultural Economics, and Library and Information Science. I've been involved in information searching, and providing and teaching the basics of electronic information retrieval for eight years, beginning with online and CD-ROM, and progressing to the Internet. Here at InterNIC, I'm involved with the weekly Scout Report (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/) and the Scout Toolkit (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/). Both are primarily end user services. This column is designed with the end user in mind. I see the Internet as an information tool, one of a suite of tools available to research and education professionals. However, the Internet is a quantitatively (and perhaps qualitatively) different tool. It has made access to a veritable flood of information possible. The problem of finding what is "useful" or "good" information is still the same as it has always been. Only now, instead of finding a needle in a haystack, users are presented with the problem of finding a needle in a hayfield. Information quality becomes an even larger consideration, because the traditional road blocks to publishing have been largely removed. An analogy was made at a recent Educom conference to "drinking water from a fire hose," which is very much on the mark when discussing Internet information resources. It is the aim of this column to make the Internet an easier and more valuable place for researchers and educators (as well as others) to get needed information. With that in mind, a variety of topics will be covered in this space, including, but not limited to: how to use various Internet access tools; useful ways to find the information you need; book or article reviews on timely Internet topics; and digests of Internet news. Also, since the Internet is a medium that users can contribute information to, as well as draw information from, topics such as considerations to think about before setting up an Internet presence, and explanations of tools that will help interested users set up that presence, will be discussed. I would like to encourage input from readers as to content for this column. It is my hope that it will help Internet users to make the most of the almost limitless potential of this information resource.
Copyright Susan Calcari and the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, 1994-1998. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the End User's Corner provided the copyright notice and this paragraph is preserved on all copies. The Internet Scout Project provides information about the Internet to the US research and education community under a grant from the National Science Foundation, number NCR-9712140. The Government has certain rights in this material. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin - Madison or the National Science Foundation.
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Introducing End User's Corner