Vocaboly.com

[Steve]

Excerpts from Jakob Nielsen's column -

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I never cease to be surprised at the miserable usability of university
websites. The Web was invented to disseminate academic papers, but
it's almost impossible to find research results on academic websites.

I didn't know the paper's title. I did have the lead author's name, so
I searched for it and was promptly led to a faculty homepage at the
University of Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, this page was useless, as are most faculty member
homepages. The most recent entry on the "selected publications" list
was from 2002.

The biography page offered no further information about the
professor's research either. It did link to his full curriculum vitae
(in PDF, oh woe), but it hadn't been updated since March 2003 and also
had no links.

Looking for the author failed to produce any information about the
research. What about the academic institution responsible for the
project?

The newspaper handily provided the department's full name, making for
an easy search. The top search result was the correct one, but the
page title - CCEB - had almost no information scent. Further probing
revealed that CCEB stands for "Center for Clinical Epidemiology and
Biostatistics." With an entire line available to spell out their
names, you'd think organizations would want to help poor outside users
by doing so.

The fact that academic websites are so miserable to use is surely a
contributing factor to the isolating and narrowing effect of current
research practices. If outsiders could more easily connect with
research results in other disciplines - where they don't know the
scientists personally - we might see more cross-fertilization and
growth in our shared knowledge base.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050411.html