Search No More
Newcastle Herald
Saturday November 4, 2000
enter
TEN years ago, a forward-thinking librarian in the US began adding useful reference sites to her Gopher bookmark file.
Three years later, Carole Leita's 'bookmarks' made their debut as the Berkeley Public Index of the Internet.
In the truest tall-oak-from-little-acorn tradition, Ms Leita's index has evolved into the Librarians' Index to the Internet (www.lii.org), a searchable, annotated directory of more than 7000 Internet resources.
At last count the site was receiving an average of 26,000 requests a day, or 180,000 a week. More than 13,000 web pages carry a Librarians' Index link.
For a search engine, these numbers are relatively modest.
But the Librarians' Index has a feature that makes it stand out from everyday webcrawlers - it carries only links that have been selected and evaluated by a team of real live librarians for the quality of their content.
Not just mere humans, mind, but librarians, people trained to apply a discriminating researcher's eye to content.
This eases the worst step in the Internet research equation - the tiresome and time-consuming trawling of dozens (or even hundreds) of search results for that 'gem' of useful and authoritative information.
The Librarians' Index to the Internet has 90 researchers and its goal is to double in size in the coming year.
The index applies strict selection criteria to potential links, ruling out any fee-based sites and assessing the accuracy, currency and purpose of the information posted.
The oldest catalogue on the web, the Virtual Library Project (www.vlib.org), has a similar philosophy.
The virtual library, which was invented by the creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, is run by volunteers who compile pages of links for areas in which they are expert.
So if you're in the market for the latest on admiralty law, or the Third Reich, or parasitology or even Chinese movies, this is a good place to begin.
But what about Joe Average, who wants a starting point for finding everyday information such as an interstate telephone number, or the capital of a country, or a piece of trivia?
One of the best bets is a reference desk - a collection of links to useful sites such as atlases, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and measurement converters.
An excellent site deserving of a place in any set of favourites is www.refdesk.com, where you'll find seven online encyclopaedias, 260 search engines and links to sites such as these:
- www.bartleby.com/108/ - The King James version of The Bible on-line with a search function.
- www.biography.com - 25,000 potted biographies of people past and present, with a nifty little feature to find out what famous people share your birthday.
- www.calculator.com - more calculators than you can poke an abacus at.
- www.askjeeves.com - a handy search engine that accepts entries phrased as questions, such as 'What is the West Bank?'
- www.virtualcalendar.com - want to know where your birthday falls in the year 2100? Go no further.
The Internet Public Library reference centre, at www.ipl.org/ref/ has a great collection of links, including one to POTUS, or the presidents of the United States.
The Reference Services Page at www.wrlc.org.au/ref_sources.html has links to online atlases and a good collection for school students.
Needle in a Cyberstack, at members.home.
net/albeej/ overflows with links, including one to the Spire Project, which has some impressive tips for researchers, and another to the Mother of All Search Engines (www.mamma.com), which deserves a mention because of its name, if nothing else.
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Other links:
OzReference - www.oznetwork.
com.au (follow OzReference link)
CIA World Fact Book -www.odci.gov/cia/publications/
factbook/
index.html
www.ehow.com
www.virtual
freesites.
com/reference.
html
rquinn@nnp.com.au
INsites>
www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
EVER wondered what the landscape of cyberspace would look like if such a thing existed? No? Me neither. But the folks at An Atlas of Cyberspaces (www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html) surely have. A series of 'maps', some in groovy 3D, show the relationship between web space, gopher space, commercial services and other parts of the online world. It's mostly egghead, but interesting nonetheless.
www.uselessknowledge.com
'IF it isn't here, it isn't trivia,' boasts Useless Stuff at www.useless
knowledge.com. A trivia quiz, random trivia, quote central, a vocabulary builder and riddles are among the sections of a site that is really too trivial for words.
www.members.tripod.com/~big_tom/kingswood.html
SOME things just can't be put into words. This hasn't stopped a bloke called Big Tom from trying on a site dedicated to perpetuating the memory of his 'mighty' Kingswood HZ. Big Tom's shrine at www.members.
tripod.com/~big_tom/kingswood.html has the mother of all Kingswood galleries, a chat forum, and some blokey links to stuff involving sheds. If the words 'pickle me grandmother' mean anything to you, this site is worth a look.
© 2000 Newcastle Herald