Organizing Web Information

[Valerie Bishop]

Peter,
You commented:

>I haven't heard of any
> institution, library or otherwise, that has attempted to collect, catalog,
> or index all paper documents regardless of content. What we do is select -
> libraries have generally collected more books than flyers or brochures,
> because we consider that the *content* of them is more useful to our users.

I think that part of the reason that flyers are not collected is due to the
difficulty in storing and preserving the item.  If the content is put on the
web, then the difficulty is storage, compared to a book, is "virtually"
eliminated.  Furthermore, the flyer content would probably be more easy to
utilize than a book, considering the limitations of reading a screen at a
time. 

The people who take the time to index content will be the ones to 
determine what content is important.  As you say, we can't index 
everything.

> But if I'm doing research in
> Linguistics, and I'm searching an index for resources in Linguistics, I
> probably don't want to get hundreds of Linguistics grad students' home
> pages in my result set along with the language corpora and articles.

As someone has doubtless pointed out, just because one is a "grad 
student" does not mean one's web-work is worthless.  On the contrary.

-Valerie Bishop
Professional Grad Student.