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Introduction - organizing the Internet
Library Trends, Fall, 2003 by Andrew G. Torok
To continue on the track developed by Bertot, the contribution from Adrienne Franco focuses on finding quality information on the Internet. She makes the point that librarians have long sought to select, organize, and evaluate information on the Internet. Her discussion includes the initial production of "webliographies" by librarians and then focuses on librarian-produced portals and portals with a high level of librarian participation.
Jerry D. Campbell examines portals from a more theoretical perspective. He discusses the Scholar's Portal project that builds on the need for a research library portal. Essentially, a scholar's portal (SP) describes efforts to create specialized subject portals for researchers, until such time as the Web becomes a digital library with seamless access to scholarly information. He builds on an earlier article by outlining the larger context within which SP falls.
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As mentioned earlier, document organization is often by media type or even by domain name. A particularly good example of this is government information. Greg R. Notess provides a history of the government on the Web. He makes the point that the government is not only a major content provider on the Internet but also a source for the organization of the content. Patricia Diamond Fletcher continues the discussion of the government's involvement in organizing the Internet by providing a firsthand analysis of FirstGov.com based on a recent National Science Foundation-funded research project. FirstGov is the portal to U.S. government information and services. Her case study analyzes the reasons leading to the success of the portal.
Quite often the value of portals is to expose users to sources that they might not normally encounter in using general search engines. Even the best search engines index less than 20 percent of what is termed the indexable or "visible" Web. Many persons, even professional researchers, are not familiar with the invisible Web. Any discussion of organizing the Internet needs to address the invisible Web. The invisible Web consists of major databases and document formats that are not indexed by most general search engines. Less familiar, even to experienced searchers, are terms such as the "opaque Web" and the "Private Web." Chris Sherman and Gary Price discuss various permutations of the invisible Web. Their article should be of interest especially to end-users of the Web.
Classification of Web-based information is often determined by popularity, thus user preferences often prompt new methods of organization and access. Amanda Spink provides an overview of recent research exploring
what we know about how people search the Web. Her paper reports selected findings from studies conducted from 1997 to 2002 using large-scale Web user data provided by Excite, AskJeeves, and AlltheWeb. The results of the research will have an impact on subsequent methods of organizing the Web according to use.
Any discussion of publication activity or use cannot avoid the topic of copyright. More than ever before, Web publishers are blatantly ignoring intellectual property rights, especially with respect to multimedia. This leads one to ask if organizers of Web publications are also contributing to copyright violations by inadvertently facilitating access to questionable material. Part of the problem lies in attempting to interpret current legislation regarding ownership of electronic publications. Rebecca P. Butler discusses implications for organizing the Internet from the viewpoints of both the owners/publishers and users. She analyzes several strands within the dilemma of the Internet and copyright. Web-based copyright issues are also addressed by Jane L. Hunter in the context of XML-based vocabularies developed to define usage and access rights associated with digital resources.
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