Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
29 July 2003

After producing an excellent study on what people on low incomes want from the Internet (easy-to-read, relevant content) and what they get, the Children’s Partnership has produced a follow-up paper for the Community Technology Review called Closing the Content Gap: A Content Evaluation and Creation Starter Kit which brings together some useful resources and gives a brief overview of projects like Firstfind which are being trialled at NY public libraries – a virtual library that provides information to low-level readers and adults with limited English skills. (Also see starthere.org a UK charity trying to do a similar job but using kiosks).

2 Comments

  1. Thanks for those links. I’m curious whether there are any plans in place for people to find Firstfind. Are libraries going to feature it as their homepage? The focus of my work has been on how people find content on the Web and my impression is that the problem often is more that users don’t know how to find material relevant to them not that relevant information does not exist online (although there are certainly such cases as well).

    Comment by eszter — 4 August 2003 @ 2:00 pm

  2. Apparently, “Several public libraries in the New York City area provide a link to FirstFind on their homepages”. I imagine since it is a project of the libraries, librarians would also be trained to direct people to the directory where appropriate. But I agree that getting people to appropriate content is an important issue as well.

    Comment by David Brake — 4 August 2003 @ 2:06 pm

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