Improved Internet Access: Guidance from Research on Indexing and Classification

Abstract

Heting Chu of Long Island University organized an Annual Meeting session entitled Improved Internet Access: Guidance from Research on Indexing and Classification. Wallace Koehler of the University of Oklahoma served as moderator for the session, sponsored by ASIS SIGs/CR, CRS, ALP and IAE; I was reactor. Though unable to attend the meeting, Marisa Urgo of KRA Corporation submitted a paper entitled A Shape for Internet Information: An Alternative Metaphor for Web Site Information. Professor Koehler read an excerpt and directed the audience to the full paper at http://www.mindspring.com/˜sophia/intro.html Urgo believes that Web sites are unique and hence require alternative methods of indexing (see section II). Shaoyi He of Long Island University presented Hyperlinks as Index Terms: Exhaustivity, Specificity and Beyond, of which the lead author is Heting Chu. They compared the links on the home pages of Web sites of five organizations, including ASIS. They examined the number of links as a percentage of the number of words on a page, as well as the consistency and specificity of the terminology. Philip Smith of Ohio State University discussed The Use of Classificatory Knowledge Structures to Guide the Design and Evaluation of Search Interfaces. He pointed out that most search systems engineers do not have an information science background and proposed that experts from our field develop a list of generic tasks for information retrieval to assist such designers. Wallace Koehler then presented Classifying Web Sites: Site Metrics and URL Characteristics as Markers. He demonstrated how elements of URLs, such as country codes, can be used to derive information about the content of Web sites. The full paper will appear in Journal of Library and Information Science. Two of the four papers were not based on traditional indexing methods; one applied traditional index evaluation techniques to the Web's linking structure, and the last focused on search interfaces. In reacting to these papers on improved Internet access, the primary author I cited was King Solomon (849-797 B.C.E.), who in his collection of observations on life, entitled Ecclesiastes, made three points that are germane to a discussion of organizing the Web. These provide the outline for my paper. In this limited space I cannot develop any theme in depth; therefore I indicate through brief bibliographic references where you can "read more about it." Koehler suggested that the Web is unindexable by traditional methods because of the huge number of sites on it. In 800 B.C.E., however, King Solomon considered the number of books excessive. Information explosion was frequently used in the decades preceding the Internet. Today the perceptions are common that print is declining and that most new documents are issued in electronic form, but Charles Meadow's Ink into Bits (1998) shows that more books are being published now than ever before, and the number of journals is increasing slightly. Many people predict that everything ever published will soon be converted to machine-readable form and mounted on the Web. Rebuttals to such predictions of the paperless society, notably Walt Crawford & Michael Gorman's Future Libraries (1995), contain estimates of the number of pages of books that would have to be digitized, which still exceeds the current number of Web pages. The authors show that full conversion is not economically feasible. Koehler estimates that there are two million Web sites. That sounds like a tremendous number of files to catalog, and some have given up on the task. Let us compare this statistic with the number of catalog records in the major bibliographic utilities. The Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) have 30 million and 39 million unique bibliographic records, respectively. Both networks contain records for a variety of media, and each of these documents may be compared to a Web site. Information science evolv