Great Scouts!CyberGuides for Subject Searching on the Web

Citation

Gorman, G.E. (2000), "Great Scouts!CyberGuides for Subject Searching on the Web", Online Information Review, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 401-411. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2000.24.5.401.4

The cover of Great Scouts! carries this bit of self‐promotion: “discover the Internet that speaks to your specific information needs”. But just exactly who “you” is remains a mystery, and this is reflected in the work’s content – popularly written for the layman, and even the upper secondary student, it covers both the sublime (law enforcement, terrorism) and the much less sublime (online shopping, entertainment), so that subjects do not always fit my image of what Joe Bloggs is likely to want from the Web. Also, the authors, both newspaper librarians, write entertainingly but with that American breathlessness and slight superficiality that irritates those of us who want to read good, straightforward and meaningful English. Perhaps the authors have been too close to journalism for too long ....

The purpose of this compendium is to evaluate the various guides or subject‐specific directories of Web resources. Often taking the Yahoo!model of categories and sub‐categories, they (individual aggregators or evaluators) are scouring the Web, or taking submitted sites and putting them into subject‐focused directories. We call these sites subject‐specific search sites and the people who compile them are our Great Scouts! (p. 3). The authors have sought to assist online researchers by providing a guide to resources that would help them find subject‐specific directories on the Web.

The resulting work, after two introductory chapters (one a useful outline of the evaluation criteria used in the subject guide that follows), is divided into four subject areas: life and times (11 subject chapters); business and professional resources (seven chapters); arts and entertainment (five chapters); science and technology (three chapters). The subject areas seem uncomfortable amalgams of categories – life and times, for example, ranges from food and online shopping to education, politics and religion; business and professional resources includes law, personal finance, countries of the world and ready reference resources. In fact a more straightforward listing of subject categories would be more logical than this illogical arrangement. Each subject chapter follows a similar (but not identical) arrangement: introduction to the subject, nominated “Great Scout” sites on the subject, other sites on the subject, sources of additional information. Thus Chapter 6, on historical resources, has a good introduction to the kinds of historical materials available on the Web, analysis of three “Great Scout” historical sites (The Labyrinth, Argos, Horus), four additional top sites.

For each “Great Scout” site the authors present detailed analysis covering such points as why the site was selected, date of creation and number of sites listed, audience, site selection procedure, means of support, topical coverage, content, searching and advanced searching facility, design, other features, etc. – all solid criteria obviously based on the librarian’s knowledge of what to evaluate. For the most part the evaluations are too verbose, when indicative information would be quite adequate. For example, the discussion of searching on LatinoWeb begins, “the directory is very simply accessed. Either you can select one of the categories (see above) and browse through the listing or you can type a word or two into the search box and it will find links with those words in the title or description” (pp. 73‐74). Phew!

Overall, though, this is a good guide to Web directories in an eclectic range of fields if one can bear the language and somewhat peculiar arrangement of subjects (to which access is much aided by a 30‐page index). It is recommended for information professionals in public libraries in particular, and also teacher librarians. It would be useful to have a more scholarly edition focusing on academic and research directories in a full range of disciplines.