Evolving Internet Reference Resources

Citation

Duckett, B. (2007), "Evolving Internet Reference Resources", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 6, pp. 521-522. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710760472

In drawing attention to a precursor to this work, Academic Research on the Internet: Options for Scholars and Librarians, published in 1999, joint editor William Miller observes how quickly the world has changed: “At that time … Google did not yet exist, Yahoo had not proliferated, blogs were yet to be born, and we did not imagine that scholars … would attempt to conduct all of their research via the Internet … Accordingly, that book covered the printed as well as online resources … This volume, on the other hand, covers only online resources, and illustrates that in certain fields, it is possible now to conduct much of one's work online on a regular basis … .” He goes on to make the important point that underlines the need for a book such as this: “The relative paucity of resources in 1999 did not inhibit the tendency of students to assume that all knowledge was already available online, and to assume that whatever they could find online for free was good enough for whatever they had to do.” Indeed!

This book consists of 25 individually authored chapters on a wide range of disciplines. From the arts there are chapters on art and artists, poetry, and film; from the social sciences anthropology, women and gender studies, education, law, and psychology; from the hard sciences, agriculture, health and medicine, computer science, and engineering; from regional studies, US history, Latin America, Asian studies, Afro‐American, travel, and maps; plus ESL, careers, nursing, and the environment. Two chapters less easily pigeon‐holed are “Composition and rhetoric” – basically language and its use, and “Frontiers of effort: librarians and professional development blogs.” This latter chapter provides an interesting plea for the use of blogs as a research source. I warmed to John Dupuis’ blogspot which supplies information titbits of interest to science and engineering librarians.

Naturally, chapters vary according to the nature of the subject covered, but a standard structure is used. Typical is the chapter on the Environment: after a Summary and Keywords, there is an Introduction which relates development of the internet to the subject, and five broad divisions. These are Environmental Portal Sites (7 sites described); General Environment Web Sites (11); Government Web Sites (9); Environmental Databases, Public and Proprietary (8); and Special Environmental Issues Sites (on Environmental Health, Global Warming, Air Quality, and Pollution). Finally there is a bibliography including websites. The chapter on Agriculture, likewise, divides up the field, this time into General (19 sites); Statistics (8); Plant Science (24); Food and Nutrition (8); and Animal Science (10). One problem encountered in the subject approach to information sources is that of the general and multi‐subject resources. I am pleased to see the authors making good use of these. Thus the Environment chapter gives prominence to the Medline corpus (MedlinePlus, PubMed, etc.). Each site featured is given a brief, but adequate, description, with good critical notes. Describing websites can result in some pretty drab prose but I found the text here fresh and lively. The authors wisely kept to a few selected sources and avoided “listography”. Both free and subscription services are featured, but not indicated.

The Index usefully includes all sites featured in the book but seems to have been unhelpfully compiled by a pretty dumb computer. Thus the “Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 77” and “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 18” are unhelpfully separated by a large chunk of the alphabet; while the Atlas of Canada comes under “The” and The Atlas of the Oceans under “Atlas”. The CIA World Factbook has no entry, not even a reference, under “CIA”. Admittedly there is at least one “double” entry and some “see” references (e.g. SOSIG see Social Science Information Gateway), but there is little consistency. Most seriously, as indicated, the definite and indefinite articles are used as filing terms. There are 65 titles and organisations entered under “The” and six under “A”, with no references from the un‐articled name.

Overall, the index is patchy, as if each author has compiled their own and an editor joined them together and pressed the A‐Z sort button. Entries such as the cumbersome “Indexing and abstracting sources, women and gender studies‐related, online resources for”, and the ghastly entry under “Legal and regulatory information” with its three columns of sub‐headings, sub‐sub headings, and sub‐sub‐sub headings, should have been edited out. Another critical point relates to the “running heads”. If the subject keyword had featured at the top of the page, then the book would be much easier to use. I found the constant need to fumble for the contents page most irritating.

The book has a strong US focus but there is a great deal of value here for students and scholars wherever they are.