The purpose of the Library Juice Web site is stated in the first sentence on its home page. “Library Juice is a current awareness service for library and information science students, librarians, and other interested people”. The statement continues on to say, “It includes announcements, many Web resources, calls for papers, and social‐responsibilities or intellectual freedom focus. It is not a discussion list but a digest of material from a variety of sources”. This review will clearly show that this site meets its objectives.
This Web site was developed by Rory B. Litwin, who began publishing Library Juice at the beginning of 1998, when he was a student in the MLIS program at San Jose State University in California. He says, “I first began to publish the Juice because not everyone who subscribed to the school’s general discussion list appreciated my enthusiasm for email or wanted to be bothered with the issues in much of the material that I was forwarding. I decided to collect the email items I was interested in and mail a compilation to interested students and some others on a weekly basis. The subscription list quickly expanded.” Mr Litwin has obviously interested some folks because at the time of this review, he has between six and seven hundred subscribers; and Library Juice is sent to all parts of the world.
Across from the mission statement is an outline of the current issue. By clicking on the issue number and date, you get into the actual articles. The issue appearing at the time of this review is Library Juice 2:11, 3/17/99. There are 17 items in this issue. They include: American Libraries Online March 15 news stories; Latest issue of RUSA Update Now on the Web; Understanding MARC Bibliographic: Machine readable Cataloging; Out‐of‐print book sites; American Women’s History: A Research Guide; Talking about people: a guide to fair and accurate language; Update on strike at the British Library; TOC: Progressive Librarian #15, Winter 1998/99; Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution; NETFUTURE and the Issues Facing Libraries; Spanish/English Dictionaries and Glossaries of Computing; Guatemala: Memory of Silence ‐ report to UN; NEZ Blocks Grant for “Story of Colors” ‐ Discussion; Practical History Website; Defend Your Data ‐ ACLU; “Freedom” software to guarantee anonymity on Web; and From _Private matters: In Defense of the Personal Life_. By clicking on each entry, you can read the article. Each entry contains additional Web sites and e‐mail addresses should you desire further information. One that caught my eye was the MARC records site. Having always found MARC records practically written in a foreign language, I was impressed that there is a Web site for this, one which I will investigate at a later date.
Below the current issue, is an endorsement for ALA president which provides a link to the ALA candidate page. I don’t know who is supporting this endorsement, whether it is a group of people or if it is Rory Litwin’s personal opinion.
There are five other things on the Library Juice homepage. You can access back issues with TOCs. You can access back issues by number. These back issues go back to January 21, 1998. You can subscribe to this Web site. You can contact the editor, Rory Litwin, and you can search the entire Web site.
Overall, this site is good. At present, a subscription is free. The editor personally rents the space on a commercial Web server. The site is very user‐friendly; the information is clear; the information is valuable to the population it serves; and, most important, it is current. I would suggest adding some color. The Web site is done entirely on a white background with black lettering, except for the title, which is in orange. Since color always cues the user, I would suggest adding color at least to the headings. I would also suggest experimenting with different fonts. Italicize headings, use the Technical font on things, in general, play around a bit. Jazz it up some. The other suggestion I have is to consider moving the list of discussion lists and news services currently feeding Library Juice out to the main page. These are buried on the back issues page and provide such a service to this site. Since they are main providers of information to this site as well as major links to a wide variety of library related sites, they should be out in the open more. At least have a link to them on the home page. The title of the site is catchy.
Mr Litwin should be applauded for his attempt at getting this information out to the public. He obviously is on the right track since over 600 subscribers have signed up in the last year since the site’s inception.
