I must confess to a bad habit. As gatekeeper to so much infor- mation for my community, I tend to get cocky. A client requests information such as, “I need some recipes for baking dog biscuits that contain no yeast or meat,” and I immediately fire up my search engine and start clicking. Or “Tell me everything about Ninon de L’Enclos.” Who? Or “Get me all the one-year Treasury bill rates back to 1985.”
Whatever the request, I jump out onto the open Web and search and search. I hardly ever stop to think, “Whoa! There are people out there who do nothing but evaluate and annotate quality sites, then make lists available for my benefit. I don’t have to wade through billions of hits then evaluate which sites are reliable all by myself. All that work has been done for me.” Not only that, but these patient souls maintaintheir lists o’ links so they don’t get out of date, unlike any list that I would generate.
I refer to those handcrafted, meticulously manicured, and—
how shall I put this?—academicallyoriented Web subject directo- ries. Yes, Yahoo! has many links and does a pretty good job categorizing them, but that directory service’s listings are not nec- essarily put together by librarians. Call me an elitist snob, but I just have to say it—nobody evaluates resources and organizes them better than we do. Nobody.
That being said, there are librarians out there, particularly aca- demic librarians, who have taken it upon themselves to build intri- cate subject espaliers along academic lines. They prune away all
but the clearest pathways to Web information. The result? An exquisite bonsai of information—authoritative, clean, yet detailed.
Browsing along a subject branch of that online bonsai is like wandering the stacks at a magnificent library. We may find the item that we wanted and then also discover others near it that suit our purposes even better. These carefully chosen, categorized col- lections foster research by serendipity, a method now recognized as legitimate, especially for humanities scholars.
What should we call these collections? They stand halfway between a portal and a vertical subject search engine with an aca- demic twist. Shall we say they are “academic subject guides,” “vir- tual reference collections,” “a selective collection of topical guides”? “Topical guides” sounds like a skin ointment. For now, let us call these resources “meta-indexes,” meaning collections of pointers to information organized by subject.
Whatever the name, these collections can satisfy both the sub- ject browser and the information lounger. If clients need a piece of quality information quickly, these guides will point right to it. If we prefer a bit of background fill, we can click around through the cat- egories, knowing that every site we find will be choice.
These quality subject portals definitely ease life at the reference desk. Following are some of the best.
Librarians’ Index to the Internet http://lii.org
If I pause long enough to actually plana search before I reflex- ively type it into Google, I often turn first to the Librarians’ Index to the Internet. Berkeley Public Librarian Carol Leita founded it in 1990 as a “Gopher” bookmark file. (Remember Gopher? It was a kind of hypertext way to telnet—before the Web.) Now run by librarian and “Internet Maven” Karen G. Schneider, the Librarians’
Index to the Internet boasts links to more than 14,000 Internet resources in subject areas maintained by more than 100 librarian indexers. You need quality information from the Internet? You will
find it here, classified, annotated, and signed. The Librarians’
Index to the Internet also features a current-awareness service, with new discoveries featured each week. You can choose to have this information e-mailed to you or pick up the RSS feed with your news aggregator.
The Internet Public Library (IPL) www.ipl.org
In 1995, students in David Carter’s graduate seminar at the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan thought up a way to answer reference questions over the Figure 4.1 Librarians do well to turn first to the Librarians’ Index to the
Internet.
Internet. The gathered and annotated quality links serve as ready- reference resources for their project. That list of links, published on the open Web, has become the public face of the IPL. All links in its vast searchable collection have been carefully selected, cataloged, and described by a member of the IPL staff. Use the IPL
“Pathfinders” (www.ipl.org/div/pf ), that is, bibliographies of both Web and print resources, as strong starting points for doing research on particular topics. Patrons who do not wish to do a search themselves can submit an IPL “Ask a Question” form (www.ipl.org/div/askus). Don’t expect an instant answer, though.
The IPL staff and its network of volunteers receive so many queries that they have at least a three-day turnaround time.
Digital Librarian: A Librarian’s Choice of the Best of the Web www.digital-librarian.com
Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York, has gathered a hefty selection of links filed under 90 categories. Most links sport a brief annotation.
Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections http://infomine.ucr.edu
This compilation of academically valuable Web resources comes from the librarians at the University of California at Riverside. Sign up for their “New Resources Alert Service,” which announces new additions by e-mail. Browse by subject or search their university-level collection by keyword, title, or author.
Pinakes, A Subject Launchpad
www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html
Dave Bond and Roddy MacLeod of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, take their lead from the poet Callimachus, who compiled an index to the ancient Library of Alexandria. This catalog was called The Pinakes. “On a far smaller scale,” Bond and MacLeod write, “these Web pages hope to provide a similar func- tion for Internet resources, by linking to the major subject gate- ways.” Especially British subject gateways. These include “Port,”
about maritime studies; “RUDI,” which covers urban design; and
“CAIN,” which concerns “conflict studies,” or, “the troubles” in Northern Ireland from 1968 to today.
Refdesk.com
www.refdesk.com/index.html
Bob Drudge, father of the Internet gossip Matt Drudge of the
“Drudge Report,” decided to “follow his bliss” in the spirit of Joseph Campbell. His bliss was to create this pretty darned com- prehensive collection of Web links, “rationally indexed.” Drudge writes, “Refdesk.com’s database is on three levels: quick, studied, and deep. For thumbnail snapshots: ‘FastFacts,’ ‘Quick Reference/
Research,’ and ‘My Facts Page.’ For a more studied approach: ‘My Virtual Newspaper’ and ‘My Search Engines.’ For an in-depth exploration: ‘My Virtual Encyclopedia’ with 50 volumes of indexed subjects.” Plus, the whole thing is searchable. Not bad for a guy who is really a psychologist. Did Mr. Drudge miss his true calling, in other words, librarianship?
BUBL LINK: Catalogue of Internet Resources http://bubl.ac.uk/
From the Andersonian Library at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, comes BUBL (originally, BUlletin Board for Libraries), a collection of selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas. Naturally, it tends to slant toward British sites. Search in alphabetic or Dewey Decimal order.