Librarian X

My review of the book Information Literacy: Search Strategies, Tools & Resources for High School Students and College Freshmen by Zorana Ercegovac is up at The Tech Static blog.

In my review, I mentioned some technology errors that I ran across in the book, but due to Tech Static’s length requirements I didn’t expand on them.  Here are a few examples of what I meant:

• The author refers to Internet Explorer as “Microsoft Explorer” (p. 98).
• Netscape Navigator (discontinued in 2007) is cited as an example of a current browser (p. 98).  The book was written in 2008.
• This is a little unclear, but in the discussion of top-level domain names (p. 86) the author implies that .org domains are only run by non-profits and .com domains by companies (of course, anyone can buy either a .org or .com domain).
• URL typos appear from time to time: “.nrt” for “.net”, a slash instead of a dot, and so on.
• LII.org is referred to as an invisible web search tool (p. 94).  In fact everything on LII is available on the open web and indexable by Google.

As I said in my review, none of these break the usefulness of the book, and there’s nothing in my nitpicky list that would trip up a savvy student or instructor (though I would have liked to see more clarity in the discussion of TLDs).  It’s a good textbook or sourcebook if you work with upper-level high school students or new undergrads.