Friday, May 24, 2013

The Laziness of the Internet Bottom Feeder


I get email:

Hi Chris,
 I stumbled on your page about career resources for students.  The page that I landed on was (link removed) and I am  looking to see if you were the correct person that administers or manages this page.  I have a question regarding the resources and wanted to know if you were the right person to help answer them.
 If you are not the right contact, I would appreciate if you could forward me to the right person!  Hope to hear back from you soon. 
Generic Woman's Name

The email address is a gmail account. The link actually took you to an outdated page on new computer science books in the library, and I'm a little ashamed that it hasn't been kept up-to-date. That's another problem. There isn't a page in the libguides about career resources for computer science students, because, to be honest, the students know more about that than I do

So what should I do? I'm not crazy enough to answer an email that can't even get the basic facts right, because who wants whatever it is they're trying to sell me. So, it's blog post time.

More email:

Hi Chris,
I would like to suggest a site for the Biology links page located here:http://libguides.brandonu.ca/content.php?pid=10652&sid=71246
The name of the site is (website removed).
It's a helpful resource for researching ecology on the Internet.
(link removed)
Generic Woman's Name
The links page isn't anything to write home about, but I don't think it's obviously outdated. The problem is the suggested site. It's on a general site that laughingly calls itself best of the web. The ecology page is awful. Just brutally bad. Does someone think I'll just link to it without taking a look. Or does someone think that it's actually good? Either thought is depressing enough.