LibraryLand moves, transforms into indexing service

[Jerry Kuntz]

LibraryLand, a set of organized bookmarks to library-related sites, has
existed for 3 years in basically the same format: an unannotated organized
hierarchy of link lists. Simple though it may be, that model has become so
labor-intensive to maintain that it can not move forward in the same format.
Rather than abandon the LibraryLand concept of providing a comprehensive
navigational site to library-related web resources, I've opted to start to
transform it into something which will hopefully be even more helpful: an
index to disparate, specific library-related resource guides being
maintained by discipline specialists. The initial attempt is online at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/LibraryLand/
Given that Roy Tennant had helped out with KidsClick!, he agreed to help me
set up some routines on the Berkeley Digital SunSITE to try this idea.
Basically, the technology consists of wget, an HTML grabbing program, and
the SWISH-E indexing engine. Wget is used to grab all HTML from these other
sites and store them on SunSITE. SWISH-E is used to index them, but also
refers to a host file when displaying search results so that the links on
the search results refer back to the original remote site, not the copied
docs on SunSITE.
So far, this technique has been used to combine into one index:

all remaining LibraryLand sections
AcqWeb
Libstats
Library Support Staff Resource Center
Young Adult Librarian's Help/Homepage
Electronic Reserves Clearinghouse
Resources of Use to Government Documents Librarians/GODORT
Health Sciences Internet Librarianship Resource Page
Book Arts Web
Conservation Online (CoOL)
The FIDDO Project

I leave it to users to offer feedback on whether this is working. CoOL is a
very large scale site, and includes much primary source material that goes
beyond my original scope of indexing only "resource guides." Therefore,
non-specific searches might bring up a lot of CoOL material. I don't know
whether this will be a positive or a negative, but is important in looking
at the practicality of indexing other large-scale sites (ALA? LC?) Plus Roy
has to get back to me on what my SunSITE disk space limits are!
Also, wget can't retrieve sites where the data exists in raw database files,
as opposed to html files (well, not easily)
Lastly, I must mention as inspiration Eric Lease Morgan's Index Morganagus,
which has existed for quite awhile on SunSITE at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/

Jerry Kuntz
Ramapo Catskill Library System
jkuntz at rcls.org