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The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

Introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper aims to describe evolution of a new public information web site, through evaluation‐refinement prototyping cycles.

An expanding range of participants is being engaged in formal evaluations as the site design evolves. The Flesch‐Kincaid Grade Level Score is applied to assess ease of reading in the wording used; the National Quality Forum guideline statements are applied to determine whether the prototyping design process is meeting performance expectations; and then Nielsen's heuristics are applied to evaluate ease of use of the latest prototype.

The page wordings started at a high reading grade level to be technically correct, with a strategy to progressively reduce levels without losing meaning. Reading level was reduced to an average of two and as much as six grades through editing between the third and fourth‐generation prototypes. None of the National Quality Forum principles were found missing from the development process. The prototype web site was ranked at the middle compared to official public web sites of seven other States' healthcare‐associated infection programs, some of which had been open to the public for more than a year. Many of the heuristic violations that weighed against the prototype were described as being minor and easily fixed. Collaboration between a State health department and a university to advance this evaluation‐refinement process was valuable to both parties, enhancing the ability to produce a new public information web site that is more likely to meet the needs of its intended audience.

In response to increasing expectations of transparency and accountability, a growing number of public web sites are displaying hospital performance data. Washington State's mandatory public reporting of healthcare‐associated infection rates is a recent example of this trend. The Department of Health is required by law to launch a public information web site by December 2009. The research was based on an evidence‐based approach to understand and meet the information needs of the public.

Although few studies have evaluated the usage and impact of hospital comparison web sites, these studies uniformly show relatively low usage and disappointing impact. Using the research literature, issues thought to account for poor usage and low impact, and developed design principles that address this poor past performance were identified. Throughout 2008 and 2009, successive prototypes were developed for the web site structure guided by those principles and refined each generation of prototype through focus group evaluations. This paper explains the approach, and summarizes results from the evaluations, leading to improvements before the final design first opens to the general public.

Internet is set to be one of the main channels of distribution in the future and already greatly facilitates product evaluation thanks to the information available on the net. The main advantages of electronic shopping over other channels include the reduced costs of searching for products and for product‐related information. Research has stressed the importance of quality information in web site design. The perceived utility of a web site depends on the perceived utility of its content (i.e. quality of information on product characteristics) and its presentation of that content. This paper compares the ways in which a web site's content and content presentation affect the product choice of two consumer groups from different cultures. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors conduct an exploratory study to determine the key factors which may be used in a later conclusive research. The authors propose a tool based on the statistical design of experiments to determine the number of significant factors used by two market segments (Spanish and US students) when selecting a bottle of wine sold via a web site.

The authors identify key extrinsic factors of consumers' perceived utility when selecting a bottle of wine from a web site and analyse whether cross‐cultural aspects are significant in this choice. The authors assume that web site evaluations made by users from different geographical areas reflect their preferences for more familiar designs.

The sample size does not enable us to determine the significance of certain variables. Moreover, the sample is not fully representative of the overall consumer population, and so inferences cannot be made about all consumers. However, since the study is exploratory with a theoretical content, the results can be considered valid.

Web page designers need to take into account the cultural characteristics of their target market in the presentation and content of their sites.

The internet marketing literature considers cultural differences in web design as a tool to improve user confidence and attitude. However, few studies have examined the effects of the cultural adaptation of web sites on user evaluations. Here, the authors propose a straightforward procedure for calculating the main effects of web site attributes. Yates' algorithm and the normal probability plot, proposed by Daniel, can be implemented in any spread sheet.

This study seeks to identify the dimensions of web site attributes that represent online shoppers' perceptions of their favorite clothing web site and to examine the relationship with the evaluation of the relative importance of various clothing web site attributes.

US college students, who had online shopping experience and favorite clothing web sites that they especially like to visit, were surveyed. Hypothesized relationships between the relative importance of general clothing web site attributes and the perceptions of favorite clothing web sites were tested using canonical correlation analysis.

The results revealed three variables, the product information, customer service and navigation factors, were closely related to each other and create a well‐defined dimension in representing the respondents' perceptions of their favorite clothing web sites. These dimensions were fairly well predicted by the following set of independent variables: the product information, navigation, and customer service factors of general clothing web site attributes.

Results cannot be generalized to all young adult consumers and to other consumers. Future research should include other population groups.

This research offers new insights to apparel e‐tailers in building effective web sites that can attract young adult online shoppers to the company and retain them through the web sites.

This study is the first to investigate young adult online consumers' perceptions of their favorite internet web sites in relation to their evaluations of the relative importance of general clothing web sites attributes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper identifies and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material, in the area of library instruction and information literacy.

The paper provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information in the paper may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

Higher education, and in particular libraries, have changed significantly over the last decade due to the adoption of technological advancements such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. The multitude of ways patrons can interact with librarians and library resources has been only the latest step in a very long process which started with traditional snail mail and the phone. As educators, librarians have always been interested in using new tools to improve services. These services are increasingly being made available to patrons who do not physically enter a library building. This paper looks at what library services are currently being offered to students at a distance in order to better plan for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

The findings provide information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The purpose of this study is to provide an assessment of the usability of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Main Library’s Web site by Master of Arts students of the Department of Library and Information Studies (D.L.I.S.) for the identification of major strengths and weaknesses of the site and to incorporate the results and participant feedback into a redesign that reflects users’ intuitions rather than those of the site developers and library staff.

One method was used to collect data; Observation. Its instruments included a list of activities executed by students followed by a checklist, which reflected day-to-day usage of the Main Library’s Web site by Master of Arts students in the D.L.I.S. In addition, both usability heuristics and International Standards Organisation (ISO) guidelines were used to assess effectiveness, learnability, usefulness, functionality, navigability and user satisfaction. Respondent strategies used a sample size of five participants in the focus group sessions. Experimental strategies combined observation of five individual participants who performed the usability tests.

The findings identified challenges in the site’s navigation, user satisfaction and learnability.

There can be further assessment, as this study did not speak specifically to students with disabilities or took into consideration the views of the librarians. Additionally, more ethnographic approaches are required to elicit distinctive Caribbean user behaviors.

The study concludes that usability training should be incorporated into the culture of the library organization as well as more usability testing needs to be done on a more regular basis and on a more student interactive basis.

The paper presents issues of usability and the impact of technology on information access, memorability, learnability and functionality of an academic library’s Web site.

The importance of creating a usable library Web site has been well documented in the literature; however, little has been written on the role of instruction in the process of Web site evaluation and design. This paper describes experience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and highlights the significant role that instruction librarians need to play in assessing and creating usable Web sites. The authors argue that instruction librarians need to address the impact that a poorly designed Web site has on user education programs, and become actively involved in the redesign process. With their unique experience and perspective, instruction librarians have much to contribute to the process, and even more to gain. By understanding the mental model our users bring to their search for information, we can improve the instruction we offer.