Subject Access to Quality-Assured World Wide Web Resources: Strategies for Information Professionals

Abstract

The development of the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web, has offered students, teachers and researchers a rich new scholarly resource, allowing unprecedented ease of access to local, national and international information. However, the World Wide Web is badly organized, much of the information found there does not meet the rigor normally expected by academic discourse, and the technologies developed to cope with the vast explosion of online information have proven to be inadequate in a number of ways. Subject catalogues of Internet resources, compiled by information professionals expert in the information retrieval systems which have proven successful in libraries over the last hundred years, are increasingly important in ensuring easy access to high quality WWW resources. After a brief general discussion which expands on the need for well-organized subject gateways to Internet resources and outline some of the problems their development and coordination present, the chapter will examine in some detail three examples of subject gateways, two of which were developed to support teaching and learning by the School of Information and Media at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. A final section will deal with the implications for information professionals of developing effective Internet subject gateways.