| Directories
or Subject Catalogs |
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| Search
Engines |
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| Meta-search
Tools |
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| Virtual
Libraries |
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Virtual libraries are directories or subject
catalogs consisting of Web resources that librarians or other information
specialists have selected and evaluated. Arranged by subject, these are
directories of a general collection of Internet and WWW resources. Several
of the directories contain reviews or descriptions of the entries.
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Two excellent examples are The Internet Public
Library, http://www.ipl.org,
and Librarians’ Index to the Internet, http://lii.org.
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An annotated list of Virtual Libraries is
available at http://www.webliminal.com/search/appendix_a1.htm.
See the Web page "Directories and Virtual Libraries," http://www.webliminal.com/search/search-web04.html,
for more details.
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| Specialized
Databases |
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Specialized databases can be comprehensive
collections of hyperlinks in a particular subject area or self-contained
indexes that are searchable and available on the Web.
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The Internet Sleuth, http://www.isleuth.com,
accesses more than three thousand specialized databases and directories.
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| Library
Catalogs on the Web |
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Libraries have often been at the forefront
of making resources available through the Internet, and thousands of libraries
allow Internet and Web access to their catalogs of holdings.
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Some resources for library catalogs accessible
on the World Wide Web are WebCATS, http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat,
and Libweb, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/libweb.
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| FTP
Archives |
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FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Dating
back to the early 1970s, it’s the original protocol used to share files
among computers with access to the Internet. There are thousands of FTP
archives containing information in various formats, such as text, data,
programs, images, and audio.
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Several Web sites allow you to search FTP
archives and make it relatively easy to retrieve files through FTP. One
is Filez, http://www.filez.com.
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| Email
Discussion Groups |
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Email discussion groups are sometimes called
interest groups, listserv, or mailing lists. Internet
users join, contribute to, and read messages to the entire group through
email. Several thousand different groups exist.
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Several services let you search for discussion
groups. One is Liszt, http://www.liszt.com
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| Usenet
Newsgroups |
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Usenet newsgroups are collections of group
discussions, questions, answers, and other information shared through the
Internet. The messages are called articles and are grouped into categories
called newsgroups. The newsgroups number in the thousands, with tens of
thousands of articles posted daily.
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Many search engines include the option of
searching archives of Usenet articles, and some services—such as Deja News,
http://www.dejanews.com—keep
large archives of Usenet articles.
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