Netvibes as subject guide???

So I decided to blog about the one topic that actually interested me this week about aggregators. That is the idea of using an aggregator such as netvibes as a subject guide.

Basically subject guides themselves are aggregators of information wherein librarians provide users with a list of links to the most relevant resources for users interested in that subject. However, unlike most online aggregators subject guides are static. They must be manually updated by a librarian.
Advantages
So the benefits of using an aggregator such as netvibes as a subject guide is that it is not static. it saves librarians from needing to constantly update links, as this is done automatically in the feeds put into the netvibes subject guide.
Disadvantages
All of the netvibes aggregators that I have seen are generally too busy and present the user with the problem of information overload. Guides are mean to “guide” the user to only the best resources. The great value of subject guides comes from the static nature of librarians evaluating and choosing only the best resources to link to.

Netvibes subject guides do not “guide” users to the best information, but rather give the users a long list of links which have not been vetted or evaluated by an information professional. Furthermore these links are presented without context.

Finally, research has shown that users do not want web 2.0 tools incorporated into subject guides. Rather, users want clean and simple guides that guide them only to a limited number of the very best resources relevant to that subject. See: Hintz, Kimberley, Paula Farrar, Shirin Eshghi, Barbara Sobol, Jo-Anne Naslund, Teresa Lee, Tara Stephens, and Aleha McCauley. 2010. “Letting Students Take the Lead: A User-Centered Approach to Evaluating Subject Guides.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 5: 39-52.

Therefore, the netvibes subject guides I have seen are not guides at all but simply long lists of links. I would argue that this is not a valuable service to provide users.

For example, I want briefly review 2 specific examples.

The BCIT Occupational health and safety resources page offers a netvibes subject guide which has the exact problems mentioned above. It contains 25 tabs, which is more than any student would have time to search through. Many of the tabs simply contain a link to another guide. And those that actually contain links to relevant resources, contain far too many. The ergonomics page contains 24 individual boxes of information and requires the user to scroll down quite a ways. This is not effective design.

In contrast, the Refuge Archives subject guide is relatively well done. Keeps the tabs in one row with only 5 tabs. However, this guide too contains long lists of links without context, which have not been vetted or evaluated. They may or may not be relevant to the user, and though they offer the rouse of saving the user time, they still require the user to sort through and process several long lists of information to find a few items which might actually help their information need.

Although I already mentioned this in class, I firmly believe that although netvibes seems like an interesting way to offer subject guides to users, it is not an effective platform for offering subject guides. I would highly discourage any librarian from using netvibes as a platform for creation subject guides. It simply does not meet standard Web usability principles, nor does it effectively meet users needs with regards to subject guides.