Information Quality - Catalogue of Potent Truisms

Edited by Dr T.Matthew Ciolek

Acknowledgements

The 'quality' networked information facilities:

1. Provide their OWN information
2. Are useful and informative
3. Are easy to find
4. Are universally accessible
5. Are well structured & organised
6. Are well formatted & edited
7. Are easy to establish, run, maintain and improve on

1. The 'quality' networked information facilities provide their OWN information.
• publish chiefly LOCALLY developed materials
• place local resources in the CONTEXT of all globally available relevant data
• links to the other sites' information are used sparingly and are always tested and evaluated
• clearly identify: (i) which information is local; (ii) which is mirrored from another site; and (iii) which is located on another site (this criterion is affected by cacheing)
2. The 'quality' networked information facilities are useful and informative.
• contain reliable information
  • format of provided data enables detection of any input errors
  • have information that has been proofread for errors
• contain useful/relevant/not trivial information
• the noise-to-information ratio is low or very low
• contain well ordered/well organised information
• contain content tags marking references to people, places, dates, concepts, resources, topics etc.
• they are regularly maintained (i.e. are not neglected or orphaned)
• contain durable information (one which will be useful and trustworthy in 50 years time)
• contain timely information (e.g. any cyclone warnings are given before its onslaught)
• contain the freshest information
• contain attributable information (author and/or organisation contact details are stated)
  • give details of the author/compiler of a given set of materials
  • give details of institutional affiliations
  • give details of the server on which the materials sit
  • give details of the server from which the materials were copied
• acknowledge any feedback by its users
• accept correct input/corrections/addenda from its users
• reject or screen stupid or irrelevant input from its users
• provide details of the copyright status of the materials
• contain indices, pointers and summaries of the information
• indices of the information etc are easily found within the server
• do not contain too many redundancies in terms of links and pointers
• 'add value' to the information they contain
• are well indexed and catalogued or provide good indexing information such as keywords to automated indexing systems
• do not violate copyright
• protect their material against copyright violations
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
3. The 'quality' networked information facilities are easy to find.
• are well advertised
• their quality can be quickly ascertained
• their quality can be confidently ascertained
• can be found through many resources lists
• can be found in many online resources-directories
• are well referenced in online resources-directories
  (the facility is identified via appropriate keywords, the facility's meta-data descriptors are accurate)
• if it is a big (and generally valuable) site, it publishes its own current awareness online bulletin
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
4. The 'quality' networked information facilities are universibly accessible.
• can be accessed, navigated and used by people with disabilities
• can be accessed via several independent entry points/several types of servers
• published information is not hardwired to a particular hardware/software platform or solution
• can be accessed by both HIGH and LOW technology client software
• are situated on a fast network link
• they run on a state-of-art, superbly fast platform
• are up 24/hrs day, 7 days/week, all year round
• all materials on it are tracked by a good, full text search engine
• they continue to exist (i.e. do not suddenly vanish from the network)
• can be accessed by several users at the same time
• can be accessed by tens of hundreds of users a day without overloading its platform
• can be accessed by information seeking agents
• cannot be brought down by information seeking agents
• provide information that is reasonably priced or free (i.e. they don't 'rip off' the users)
• have at least a limited level of free, browse only access to information that is charged for
• have fair and accurate descriptions of information that is charged for
• have fair and accurate descriptions of methods of charging
• are easy to leave, easy to disconnect oneself from
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
5. The 'quality' networked information facilities are well structured & organised.
• are easy to navigate
• for a given subject matter they do not contain too many (less than 5 ?) levels of nesting
• utilize principles of cognitive ergonomics
• do not contain dead links
• do not contain links to empty subdirectories
• do not contain superceded, redundant files
• provide well annotated (location of the resource, its content, its brief evaluation) links
• do not contain erroneously labelled links
• make a consistent distinction between local and external links
• make a consistent distinction between informational (subject matter) and navigational (e.g.to the top/bottom of the page, to a home page, to a central search engine, to help file etc) links
• make a clear consistent distinction between information itself (page's or site's subject matter, area of specialisation) and the meta-information (comments, glosses, additional data on the purpose and circumstances of the subject matter)
• are network-friendly, they help to protect and conserve the bandwidth
  • do not contain spurious and merely-decorative graphics
  • make judicious use of files with sounds and moving images
  • do not contain graphics-based record separators, punctuation-marks etc.
  • are small enough to be quickly accessed on the network
  • are large enough for the access on the network to be worthwhile
  • links to 'big' ('network-unfriendly') resources are carefully annotated
  • make sparse and justified use of the cgi programmes & Hot-Java special effects and applets
  • discourage promiscuous "Hypertext Link Impulse"
  • discourage irrational "Surf Impulse"
  • discourage irrational "Print Impulse"
  • discourage irrational "Form-Filling Impulse"
• lead only to other 'good' information facilities
• encourage adherence to the principles of "Netiquette"
• are robust and resilient to accidental or deliberate misuse
• have a statement about the purpose of the server
• have an indication of intended audience/users of the server
• have an indication when the server was last updated
• have an indication how often the server is updated
• have an indication of the date and nature of changes to the document in question
• have a link to a "New materials" page listing new material added
• have name and contact details of the server administrator
• provide adequate background information about the site
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
6. The 'quality' networked information facilities are well formatted & edited.
• are legible, well spaced and well balanced across the page
• are legible and well formatted even on other people's client software
• in addition to the local language they also use English
• do not contain exotic characters, diacritic markings etc
• provide direct access to public-domain specialist browser software whenever exotic languages (e.g. CJK or Arabic) are used as the part of the document
• are user-friendly
• utilise principles of ergonomics
• are aesthetically designed
• have a light, crisp, professional, understated appearance
• make healthy use of both Upper and Lower case characters
• do not overuse underlines, bolds, italics and hypertext links
• do not contain spelling/typing errors
• do not contain unfamiliar abbreviations and acronyms
• do not contain computerese, 'in' expressions and jargon
• have a consistent look and 'feel'
• have a look & 'feel' congruent with the institution's other servers
• have a look & 'feel' congruent with the institution's 'corporate image'
• have a look & 'feel' congruent with 'official' e-publication guidelines
• look good and informative also when printed out (i.e. the key hypertext links have their URLs stated in plain ascii code)
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
7. The 'quality' networked information facilities are easy to establish, run, maintain and improve on.
• are easy to install
• are easy to modify
• are easy to run
• are easy to backup
• are inexpensive to run
• keep detailed and well organised statistics about the usage patterns
• ..... what else ? .... please advise !
In addition, high quality networked information facilities are exhaustive but not too complex, they are intelligent but also docile, they are self-reliant and automated yet they always remain controllable etc., etc. [please contribute further truisms] to this line.

• Top 10 Ways to Make Your WWW Service a Flop (www.ciolek.com, Australia)
• Netscape Enhanced Pages - Hall of Shame (www.meat.com, USA)
  [contents of the http://www.meat.com/hos.html page are no longer available online, nor are they stored in the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) - tmc 6 Oct 2005]
• Things to Avoid When Writing HTML (HTML dont's) (ERIN, Australia)
  [contents of the http://www.erin.gov.au/www-standards/www-authoring/htmldont.html page are no longer available online, nor are they stored in the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) - tmc 6 Oct 2005]

• The Best of the Web (botw.org, USA)

URL http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/QltyPages/QltyTruisms.html