You Can Get Anything You Want With Alice's Search Directories

My friend Alice, is a phenomenal librarian. Seriously, she is practically famous for a librarian. She has been on the Newbery committee and the Printz medal committee. She sent this email out to her colleagues at the very fancy Winsor School (for Girls) and it gives away most of the secrets of librarianism.

It is, in fact, a nice guide to finding useful, reliable websites.

Dear Colleagues,

Has this ever happened to you? You need to find high quality websites related to your discipline. You go onto Google and do a search, and you get 50 million hits. You don't have time to search through even a fraction of those to find excellent sites that meet your criteria. It is often at that moment that you email one of your beloved librarians and ask, "Do you know of any good websites about ...?"

Well, we might, because we're that good. But I will let you in on a secret. We know where to look to find high quality websites. And I am now going to share that information with you.

When librarians want to find high quality websites, we use internet subject directories. Unlike search engines (e.g. Google), which look for your search terms and return any sites in which those words appear, subject directories are compiled by actual people. Yahoo is an example of a subject directory. But there are also very high quality subject directories compiled by academics--often librarians-- with websites evaluated and selected by librarians and/or specialists in their fields.

Below is a list of just some of the subject directories we use. There are many others; in fact many of these will lead you to other directories, including subject-specific ones.

Internet Public Library
"A public service organization and a learning/teaching environment" from the University of Michigan School of Information. (Riva worked with them when she was a grad student in their program!)

http://www.ipl.org/

Best of the Web
A private organization in which editors evaluate sites according to specified criteria.
http://botw.org/

Librarians' Internet Index: Websites You Can Trust
This tool was begun by a reference librarian in the early 1990s in Berkeley and has remained one of the most trusted and highly used search directories.

http://www.lii.org/

Awesome Library
A k-12 site that is recommended by the American Library Association and many other organizations.
http://www.awesomelibrary.org/

Digital Librarian: a Librarian's Choice of the Best of the Web
http://www.digital-librarian.com/

Intute
As you can infer from the URL, this is a British directory. It "allows access to both subject-specific and cross-subject resources, all of which have been evaluated for their quality and relevance."

http://www.intute.ac.uk/

Alcove 9: An Annotated List of Reference Websites
From the Library of Congress.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/alcove9/

The WWW Virtual Library
Started by the guy who invented the World Wide Web (no, not Al Gore), this "is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert."

http://vlib.org/

Index to Internet Resources from College & Research Library News by Topic
From the American Library Association, a collection of articles on subject-specific web sites.
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/internetresourcestopic.htm


Also try going to reputable college and university library sites, which often include subject directories. Click on your subject and look for free websites (as opposed to their own subscription-only databases). Here are just a couple of good ones to start with:

Columbia University Libraries Subject Guides
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eguides/

Rutgers University Libraries Subject Research Guides
http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/research_guides.shtml

One final note: there isn't anything wrong with searching Google, but use the advanced search feature and do some limiting, like excluding ".com" sites, looking for sites that have been updated in the past year, etc. Then you, as subject specialists yourselves, can evaluate the sites.

I hope you find this helpful. Do let us know if you have any questions (or if you find anything incredible!).

Cheers,
Alice