Why does it matter who (or what) maintains a Web page (or site)?
First, I'd like to discuss when to use the Internet and when you are better off sticking with printed sources. This year, I have had several parents who needed to complete son or daughter's school assignment. What surprised me is that these parents were genuinely feeling betrayed that they had Internet access but still found themselves at the public library where I was able to promptly put books in their hands and send them off to the photocopier (with the parents of the rest of the students in son or daughter's class).
Regarding the how and why to search the Internet, a major part of my job as a professional reference librarian is to know both where and how to look. This is the first thing I was taught at library school. It first depends on what information you need.
If you are doing the ubiquitous Indians of Texas assignment (a real favorite of fourth and seventh grade teachers in Texas), you need information on how specific Native American tribes lived before the Europeans (i.e. white men) showed up. I have several excellent reference books which I have been relying on for years which give the information teachers want the students to find on the Karankawa, the Jumanos, the Lipan Apaches, the Kiowa, the Comanches, etc.
If, however, you want to know how the Comanches are faring in 1999 and perhaps are interested in why museums all over the United States are currently in the process of cataloging Native American remains preparatory to returning said remains to their respective tribes, then this is a current, even a breaking story. Several excellent Web sites have lots of information such as this.
We also get a lot of demand at my library regarding the dinosaur assignment. Again, I have entire encyclopedias (one-volume but full of just the right information for a good school report) devoted to dinosaurs. If, on the other hand, you want to know more about the Utahraptor (a relatively recently discovered dinosaur), the Internet is a good source as well as popular magazines such as Discover, Scientific American, etc.
My rule of thumb is that I remember when books and magazines first began to be available on computers online, cd-roms, etc. This was in the mid-1980's. So, if I'm looking for something that primarily occurred or began to have a lot written about it in the last ten years, online sources such as the Internet might be a good bet.
The Internet will not always be the answer. It does not have the general
information found in a good public library. But it has its role, too.
Yes. It is true that you can find today's headlines easily on the World Wide Web. You can find out the latest news, what's happened in the last hour, better on the World Wide Web. But for research into older stories and to access copyrighte materials, it is much more difficult to find suitable sites on the Web. (See Not Found on the World Wide Web.)
TIP: The Web changes. Just as people move and change their postal addresses (or stop what they are doing and do something else), Web addresses change without notice and relatively frequently. Web pages come and go. But, thankfully, the World Wide Web does not change out of all recognition. There are some (relative) constants. If you remember only ONE of all the TIPS I have given you, remember this one!!
Librarians have an advantage when it comes to surfing the Web in search of information to answer reference questions. We already know the importance of devising an appropriate search strategy which involves both choosing the most appropriate sources and the best search terms.
I have been answering ready reference questions using the Internet for several years now. I primarily use the World Wide Web for this. Depending on the question, a search engine is frequently a good place to start. A search engine is, figuratively, the Internet's version of The Little Engine That Could. My American Heritage dictionary has a definition of engine which states An agent, an instrument, or a means of accomplishment. I.e., something which DOES SOMETHING.
The "something" which search engines do is particularly clever. Search engines sift through millions and millions of World Wide Web pages and will retrieve those particular pages which contain the term(s) specified by the user. Search engines make the World Wide Web navigable.
TIP: However, none of the search engines I regularly use are particularly forgiving if your term(s) are misspelled. Before going online, make the best effort you can to verify the spelling of all terms. I cannot emphasize this enough.
Not all search engines are the same. I like to use AltaVista for keyword searches and I like to use Yahoo! for subject searches, as a rule of thumb. I also like HotBot for the phrase or the person searches.
That is, if I were tempted to use the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature for a print search, I would start with Yahoo! (I have had a lot of success with Yahoo! but I never assume that if Yahoo! doesn't have it, it doesn't exist!!)
I also use AskJeeves quite a bit for a running head start on good sites.
TIP: When you are using a search engine to search for a person, be sure to type in the first name first and the last name second. This goes against my grain as a librarian, but I cannot argue with results. It works. Thus, type in "Ross Perot" and never "Perot Ross" . You will get much better results. I have even found instances where it was better to type in the last name and the first name separately. (Such as in Altavista: type +"perot" +"ross" .)
TIP: You can search either the World Wide Web OR Usenet with AltaVista.
(Usenet is one-email-to-many, that is one person leaves an email message for everyone subscribed to that particular email group to read and respond to. Each email group is restricted to one specific topic. A moderator makes sure that people stay on that topic. It is a quick way to ask a room full of experts, that is the people who read that particular email group's messages, a question and possibly get a lot of answers in fairly short order, hopefully including good answers.)
Searching Usenet can be useful if you need specific opinions or recommendations or advice. Of course, you have to be wary whether the people offering the advice or opinions are actually the experts which they purport to be.
TIP: Personally, I prefer to go to the TEXT-ONLY screen and tell it to give me the results in the COMPACT (rather than DETAILED) format. This will show you the results on the same screen rather than having to scroll down through them. (In other words, each result is displayed on one line, rather than taking up several lines. More results can be thus be shown per screen.)
TIP: You can tell a lot about a Web address (or URL) sometimes by the address itself.
Let me give you some URLs I use frequently and see if you, too can guess what the site is just from the URL: (Sometimes names can be deceiving.)
(Hint: Position the cursor over each link, in turn, and look at the URL in the bar at the bottom of the Netscape screen. Do not click or else Netscape will take you to the link and you will not have the chance to guess!)
1)Mystery Link #1
2)Mystery Link #2
3)Mystery Link #3
4)Mystery Link #4
5)Mystery Link #5
6)Mystery Link #6
7)Mystery Link #7
8)Mystery Link #8
9)Mystery Link #9
OK, we know that #1 is the Web site for a corporation because it ends in "com". We also know that the name of the corporation contains the letters "chron". In fact, this is the site of Houston's metropolitan daily newspaper, Houston Chronicle.
TIP: The Houston Chronicle site contains a search engine for just its site. (Many Web sites do.) If you are already a daily (and/or Sunday) subscriber to the print Houston Chronicle and have registered with the site, you can search the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post back to 1985 and retrieve fulltext articles that have appeared in the paper (if the Houston Chronicle had the electronic rights to that story).
We know that #2 is also a commercial site because it again ends in "com". It is a site with the word AltaVista in its name. In fact, this is the well-known AltaVista search engine site.
#3 ends with the letters "html". This tells us that this is not a site with many pages (such as the first two). This Web address is for a specific Web page. This Web page is named "fedwebloc" because this is the Federal Web Locator Service page, maintained by Villanova University ("edu", remember, means that this is a university site). In fact, I believe that we will find that this site is maintained by the law school at Villanova.
To test this out, click here. After this Web page finishes loading, use the mouse to put your cursor at the end of the address in the "Location" box near the top of your browser screen. Backspace over "fed/agency/fedwebloc.html" until all you have left is http://www.law.vill.edu/ . The box changes from "Location" to "Go To:" as soon as you start backspacing.
Now hit the return key. Netscape will take you to http://www.law.vill.edu/. Now we can see that this page is maintained by the Villanova Center for Information Law & Policy. The Villanova Center for Law and Policy indeed maintains several other highly interesting Web pages, just as I suspected.
TIP: Often, when you see one good page maintained by a source, other good pages can be found on the same (overall) site. It is frequently worth it to look around. Similarly, when you find a near-hit, exploring the rest of the site can yield pay dirt!
I had to take out the "law" part to finally reach this Web page: About Villanova.
This told me that Villanova University is located in the greater Philadelphia, PA area and some history about the school. (Note that this page ends in "htm". This means the same thing as "html", just probably was a page created on a PC rather than on a Macintosh computer.)
Now on to URL #4. This one ends in "org". This might be a non-profit corporation or organization. (If it were a commercial enterprise, it would more likely end in "com" or "net".) In fact, this is the site for Project Vote-Smart, a nonpartisan national voter information organization.
#5 is the ERIC home page. ERIC is a federal government entity whose acronym stands for "Educational Resource Information Clearinghouse". Teachers love it, and rightly so.
#6 is another specific Web page because it ends in "html". This page happens to be the Houston Public Library's Frequently Asked Telephone Reference Questions. It is a gold mine of those questions we are always looking up such as members of President Clinton's cabinet, the names of the United States Supreme Court justices, etc. I think that it is a good candidate for bookmarks!
(See Quick Tips: Netscape for instruction on adding bookmarks.)
What is a FAQ and why is it great for reference work?
TIP: FAQs (such as this Web page) are the Internet's standard way of handling Frequently Asked Questions. Think of FAQs as similar to printed encyclopedias, handbooks, and almanacs rolled all up into one.
Someone figured out that new users (in whatever subject area) were all going to be asking the same basic questions over and over again. People who had been using the Internet for some time were becoming impatient (and bored) by the endless repetition, as the same questions were repeated and over for each new user.
So, the FAQ became a lifesaver not only for the experienced Internet user (who could then get on to researching new topics) but also for the new user (who could painlessly get the answers to the obvious questions which, of course, were all new material for the new user).
FAQs are especially helpful for librarians because they are succinct and discuss the basics of the topic at hand. When I do not know anything about something and I come to a Web page with a FAQ, I read the FAQ immediately. It is quite often the most valuable link on a Web page for me.
#7 ends in "index.html". Thus, it is a specific page but in this case it is an integral part of its Web site because it is an index leading to numerous other pages on the site. fastWEB: Financial Aid Search Throughout the Web is a page I have uncovered relatively recently, after much diligent searching. It is maintained by the corporation called fastWEB but it has the support of university financial aid officers, people whose expertise on this topic is unquestionable. Knowing who supports a particular Web site is important for the reference librarian who wants to evaluate the reliability of the information presented.
A lot of World Wide Web pages are not maintained by universities or major corporations or nonprofit organizations nor the government. They are maintained by private individuals. So, you take any information you find on such pages with a grain of salt, as you would a page maintained by a corporation with a vested interest in your buying their product.
If you look through the URLs on my home page, you will probably not find too many sites which turn out to be an individual's Web page. I gravitate towards pages maintained by sources I consider authoritative (or at least credible), as would most librarians.
URL#8, is a really neat site. This site is the official White House home page. The best part is that this site has its own search engine and you can find press releases, the full text of speeches, and much more!
URL #9 is not the home page of an import company that sells products from the Amazon basin. It is a URL for a bookseller. This bookseller maintains an online catalog of over one million titles and includes the ISBN number in each entry. It will tell you if the book is in print or out of print. It has the author and original publisher and publication date. I do not like to favor one commercial entity over another (there are, after all, other bookstores on the Web) but this site is so useful that I cannot help using it. (OK, I admit that my fiance Clif and I have our OWN Web bookstore affiliated with Amazon.com, so I DO have a vested interest in mentioning Amazon.com!) Here is one of its entries for books on Indians who lived in Texas:
Fantastic Futures Books, in
association with Amazon.com Books, brings you the best in Science Fiction and Fantasy, now even before publication!
Amazon.com
Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains
The Jumanos : Hunters and Traders of the South Plains
by Nancy Parrott Hickerson
Paperback
List: $17.95 -- Amazon.com Price: $16.16 -- You Save: $1.79(10%)
Published by Univ of Texas Pr
Publication date: August 1, 1994
ISBN: 0292730845
One last TIP:
TIP:If you have looked and looked for something whether on the World Wide Web and still cannot find it, it may really not be there. It is hard to say if it was there or not and you just missed it. But always remember that every bit on both the World Wide Web and Usenet was put there by a fellow user. Perhaps no one put the information you needed out there yet. Sometimes no answer is still an answer.
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Last Modified: 3/28/99
