I see most of my talk as pure commonsense from a librarian viewpoint. Smith notes that this is the area where criteria for Internet resources differ most from print resources. Such criteria include, user friendliness , that user interface issues have been addressed, such as menu design and screen readability. Although Internet information resources have been perceived as free, costs do exist and are likely to become more important. For example, users may have to pay for ISP connection costs, which would be higher for sites which are slow to access.
Some commercial sites require users to register and pay via credit card to be subscribing members.
Other sites require user registration, make no charge for this, but nevertheless create an overhead for the user in keeping track of userids and passwords. It follows, of course, that the preceding evaluation criteria for other peoples' web information should be taken into account when producing one's own documents. Created 9 Jun 98. Updated 10 Jun 98. By George McMurdo .