The importance of visual literacy

Over the past couple of months I have received numerous calls about the Biz Wiki.   The callers,   emailers, and IMers all have something in common:   they all own a business or work at a business whose name or contact information is incorrect on the Biz Wiki.   I even got a call recently from some lady in Mississippi who kept getting calls at her home   because people thought she was in the recycling business.   All of these people said they got their information from the Biz Wiki.   Actually, the did get their information from a biz wiki, but it was not The Biz Wiki.   I don’t have information about individual companies in the Biz Wiki, as it is a site meant to promote useful business research sources.   The other wiki is a collection of company names, addresses, and other information.     (I’m not going to link to the other wiki here out of spite, as I don’t want to increase it’s page rankings.   Google it if you want to see it. The address has something like bizwiki and .com in it. 😉   )   While the idea of using a wiki as a company directory is a good one, it’s not so good if a lot of the content is just plain wrong.   Wrong information is irritating, as are the frequent phone calls requesting that I fix the inaccuracies.   Folks are even more irritated when I very politely tell them they’ve got the wrong wiki, but a little visual literacy could have saved them a phone call.

If we compare the two sites, they are not very similar at all, save for the words “biz” and “wiki.” I seriously wish I had trademarked the name.

The original Biz Wiki

Folks are likely finding me by searching for Biz Wiki, and then they see a guy named “Chad” with lots of different ways to contact him.   They’re good at Googling, or so they think, and they think they’ve found the root of all the misinformation about their company.   Unfortunately, their sleuthing isn’t good enough, as somehow they can’t figure out that the two sites (see screenshots above) are not similar at all.   A quick look at the two sites ought to alert them that something is different with my contact information page and the other web site.   A simple look at the address bar would tell folks that the sites are in two different locations, but perhaps they don’t know to look in the address bar.       The people are kind of miffed when I p0litely tell them that I’m not the guy responsible for that site and I cannot correct the information there.   Many of them ask who I should contact, but the contact information of the other site is very sparse (a email form with no contact info whatsoever).

These are basic skills that librarians teach in information literacy and library instruction sessions.   We teach our students how to look for authority in a website, how to look at the address (edu, gov, org, com, etc.) , look for the author information, and even to look at the design.   Hopefully the things we’re teaching them are sticking, so they’ll be a bit more saavy consumers of web information.   While the phone calls and email about the other biz wiki are a bit annoying,   they do lend evidence to the fact that librarians are still important in the education process.   My theory is that the folks who called me never had a library instruction class in college, or perhaps they’re the one’s who didn’t listen very well.   I know I’ll be a bit more deliberate in my libray instruction sessions from now on, and hopefully I’ll save some poor chap some phone calls down the road.