Monday, 19 July 2010

Intute

Intute has always seemed to us to be the embodiment of the "mother knows best" tendency of information literacy and its demise can be seen as a demonstration of the futility of librarians trying to categorise the web on behalf of an uninterested public, quite happy to use search engines

You'd think its termination would bring some humility to those involved but not a bit of it. It was, apparently, "a hotbed of technical innovation" which explored "a staggering range of new technologies" and made "groundbreaking forays into virtual worlds"!


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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous21 July 2010 at 09:47

    Intute spent millions, and did some good work and helped lots of students, however for the past few years, I'd go along with your 'futility' opinion.

    Interestingly, the post you link to continues: "have explored a staggering range of new technologies; whilst only a fraction of these have evolved into live service enhancements"

    One has to ask why did so few evolve?

    Having been, in the past, involved in some of these 'explorations' I found the fact that so few evolved very frustrating.

    For example, out of the RDN Subject Portals projects, TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/ managed (just) to evolve - but with no funding, and very slowly, and not half as much as it might have.

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  2. Anon22 July 2010 at 04:37

    Thanks, Roddy. We don't wish to imply that every Intute initiative was without merit but as practising librarians we found the service of limited use, despite the claims made on its behalf. It's that gap between rhetoric and reality that we like to highlight.

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  3. Anonymous22 July 2010 at 12:02

    Try searching Intute for: photovoltaic windows

    Zero hits

    A suggestion to search: photo voltaic windows

    Click on that link, and it instead searches for: photo

    Search for: photo voltaic windows

    Zero hits - plus: Did you mean photovoltaic windows

    which actually searches for: photovoltaic

    That's rubbish!

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