On the Web



A Yale Yahoo?

Although news reporters are obsessed with evidence of old-fashioned lust on the Internet, the dominant lust on the Web is clearly the lust for making lists. Directories that guide one to resources on the Internet are so prevalent that the Web sometimes seems to be nothing more than a vast collection of lists pointing to other lists and back again. But from the first Web page's list of really cool sites to the mega-directories like Yahoo and WWW Virtual Library, making lists has been the first defense against getting lost in chaos. Apparently, there aren't enough yet: the librarians at Yale University are making one of their own, and it keeps growing. It's a big shared bookmark file for Yale arranged by subjects.

They call it "Selected Internet Resources" and you can see it on the Web at

<http://www.library.yale.edu/Internet/yalesir.html>

You could add it or a part of it to your own lists. Their purpose is to provide the Yale community with subject-organized access to a selection of Internet resources chosen to serve the specific research and academic interests of the Yale community ‹ teachers, researchers, students, and other librarians.

The documents, Web sites, and other stuff included in Selected Internet Resources are picked by the same Yale librarians who choose books, journals, and other materials for the library. The "about" message says that resources chosen for inclusion must meet minimum criteria. Just being there isn't enough for these librarians. The resources must be clearly identified, consistently available, regularly maintained, and freely accessible to the Yale community.

The librarians have arranged the Selected Internet Resources by subject in an array of hierarchical menus. Broad discipline categories at the top lead to particular resources at the bottom. The lists link to interesting things. Look at the International Affairs page under the behavioral &;social sciences category; the Latin American Studies pages under humanities; and Nursing or Pharmacology under medicine. Check out the great banner at the page tops, too. Frank Tierney at Yale University Printing Services made it.

It seems more promised than done, but it's coming along. And you can help it grow. Each of the pages has an e-mail link to the librarian who is selecting materials for the subject (or to a list of the subjects and the librarian who selects each subject.) If you know a great page, tell them. If you've got lots of lists among the people in your department and it's too confusing to keep track of them all, ask the librarians if they could make one list of resources in your subject area. You could just link to it. Who knows, maybe by making one more list of stuff on the Internet, we'll end up with fewer lists.



Matthew Beacom is Catalog Librarian for Networked Information Resources. He can be reached by sending e-mail to:mbeacom@minerva. cis.yale.edu

Back to October 1995