Design shirk: disparities between the wealth of our material and the poverty of its use

Abstract

Libraries and other institutions of higher learning have a number of advantages when it comes to developing web-based media. First they are repositories of large amounts of traditional content which they can digitise and make available to the public to great effect. Second they have a role in instruction which acts as a great incentive to develop original materials of all sorts for online use. Both these factors are the building blocks of a considerable presence on the web yet they do not always lead to an equivalently prominent level of accomplishment in execution or, more specifically, in design. The following article examines this situation, its causes, and what can be done to remedy it.