Jean Armour Polly

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Jean Armour Polly is the author of The Internet Kids & Family Yellow Pages (Osborne McGraw-Hill, now in its fourth edition , October, 1999), a family-friendly directory to 4,600 of the best children's resources the Internet has to offer. Author, librarian, and mom, Jean also wrote the original "Surfing the Internet" back in 1992, which coined the phrase according to Lexis-Nexis. She was one of the first two women elected to the Internet Society Board of Trustees (1993-96), and is now a Trustee Emerita.

Under her Net-momŽ brand, she is a private consultant, researcher, and speaker. Past clients have included America Online, The Bertelsmann Foundation, Disney Online, MCI Foundation, The Morino Institute, and TCI.Net. She has also been a television and radio product spokeswoman for GuardiaNet, Ask Jeeves for Kids, and Ameritech. She appears in video and voice-over on Cruise Control, an online safety CD ROM produced jointly by Ameritech, the Urban League, TechCorps, and The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She has written the Best of the Web reviews for Children's Television Workshop, and created a fully-annotated directory of sites for Advanced Network and Services' ThinkQuest library. Jean also writes weekly columns for the Ask Jeeves for Kids Web site and for FamilyClick.com, and is developing a regular column on Edpoint.com. Publisher of Net-mom News, Jean authors a free electronic newsletter. It is aimed at Internet families trying to make sense of new Net resources, issues, and ideas.

Jean served on the board of the Recreational Software Advisory Council on the Internet (RSACi), a group promoting rating of Internet resources by their authors. She is also a member of the Internet Content Rating Association's Advisory Board. Jean has also functioned as Co-Chair of the Children's Category of the international Global Information Infrastructure Awards competition as well as a three time-finals judge in the international ThinkQuest competition, sponsored by Advanced Network and Services, Inc.

Formerly the Director of Public Services and Internet Ambassador at NYSERNet, Inc. (a regional ISP network) Jean was co-principal investigator on the landmark "Project GAIN: Connecting Rural Public Libraries to the Internet" study (1994) and producer of the accompanying video.

Prior to that, Jean was a public librarian for sixteen years. She is co-founder and moderator emerita of PUBLIB, the oldest and largest Internet discussion list for public librarians.

During Jean's watch, the Liverpool Public Library began many innovative programs, including an electronic BBS (1983-85), a public computer lab (1981-present), and a circulating software collection (1984-present), which was later named in her honor.

Jean received her BA in Medieval Studies at Syracuse University in 1974, and her Master's in Library Science from the same University in 1975.

She is a member of the American Library Association and is a former director of the Library and Information Technology Association's Board.

She lives on a hill in Central New York, above a forest full of raccoons, fox, and deer. Mom to a teenage son, Stephen, Jean also enjoys her cats, ducks, and a garden pond full of goldfish and water lilies. Her husband Larry works in Web development at University Hospital and is system administrator of the netmom.com and pollywood.com domains. More about Jean is available at her current home page,

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