Bottom Line on Electronic Libraries

[Anne Callery]

hello!  It's your lurking (but friendly) Yahoo! librarian again...

On 2 Oct 1996, "Alain Vaillancourt" <NDGMTLCD at GSLIS.Lan.McGill.CA> wrote:

> > >      It's time you set up your local community/area/regional/
> > > metropolitan digital library - for Jack and Jill AND Little
> > > Joey.
> > 
> > Didn't yahoo already do that? Don't forget yaholligans.
> > 
> Not really, Yahoo is more like those beginnings of classification 

I wonder if the writer here was referring to the Yahoo! regionals...  
There are metro guide already for the San Francisco Bay Area 
(sfbay.yahoo.com), Los Angeles (la.yahoo.com), and New York 
(ny.yahoo.com).  Chicago is coming up next, then a whole bunch more.  
These sites are great local resources, not only with links to all the 
good, locally relevant sites, but also with lots of original content 
provided by Yahoo! (e.g., classifieds, message boards, personals) and 
local partners (e.g., Yahoo! SF Bay Area has entertainment listings from 
the Guardian, a local free weekly.

> The web's 
> graphic capacities are nearly ignored by Yahoo to give but one 
> example.  Nowhere do we get the chance to even SEE the intricate 
> branching tree created by the Yahoo hierarchies.  Ideally, of course, 
> we should be able to see this tree and be able to click on the 
> relavant branches and fruits to get to relevant points, but that is 
> more complex.

Actually, you can do this to some extent.  For example, go to Arts 
(www.yahoo.com/Arts/) and select "Sub Category Listing" to see the entire 
tree for that category.  There isn't one for all of Yahoo!, but you can 
see trees like this for each of the 14 metacategories.  A lot of these 
categories are linked from (and to) other areas.  That's one of the great 
advantages of a web directory -- we can put "see" references all over the 
place, to make topics accessible in different areas.  These links are 
indicated by "@" after the title.  Selecting the link will show you where 
it resides, which is also a useful lead to related topics and sites.

Also, re Yahoo!'s lack of graphics -- we intentionally keep them to a 
minimum to make the directory accessible to users on all systems and 
uncluttered for users on any system.

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Anne Callery                  Yahoo!                 anne at yahoo.com
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