The lack of standards for organization of Web material is a much-discussed topic among information professionals. And not surprisingly, as the traditional organizers and managers of information, librarians have been among those pursuing the daunting task of organizing the Web.
Why organize the Web?
Librarians and other information professionals realize the significance of Web classification and organizational standards in terms of access. If the books in your local library were tossed on the floor, imagine how difficult it would be to wade through the mess and locate that particular one you need. As mentioned above, the current system of retrieval of uncatalogued and unorganized Web documents via search engines is sorely lacking. Despite the improvement of search tools and the creation of new ones everyday, the Web requires more sophisticated organizing principles that will allow for improved, more efficient access to the wealth of information contained in it.
Methods of Organization
There are two levels at which librarians and others are attempting to organize the Web: first, at the individual document level, and second, at the level of grouping like documents together in an organized way.
Cataloguing
Librarians have been describing and cataloguing individual documents (books) for the purpose of ease of retrieval for years, thus it’s no surprise that they have carried these methods over to Internet documents. Three well-established cataloguing standards in the library field are MAchine Readable Cataloguing (MARC), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and Anglo American Cataloguing Rules II (AACR2). The consistent application of these standards to books and other media enables the items to be retrieved from library catalogues with a high degree of precision. For example, LCSH are used in most library catalogues in North America. Items that arrive in the library are analyzed by cataloguers and assigned the LC subject heading(s) deemed most appropriate and that best characterize the subjects of the items. Some prominent Web directories using LCSH include INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections, The Librarians’ Index to the Internet, and The Scout Report Archives.
A standard that has evolved more recently with the advent of electronic resources is metadata. Metadata is simply data about data – descriptive labelling and information about a resource which accurately represents that resource. The author, title, and subject fields in the records of a library catalogue are therefore examples of metadata, as are a books’ table of contents and index. If authors and/or cataloguers of Web resources consistently applied metadata – called meta tags - for their documents then those documents could be much more easily and consistently retrieved. The Dublin Core is probably the most well-known metadata project. Others include Britain's Art, Design, Architecture, and Media Information Gateway (ADAM) and the Government Information Locator Service (GILS).
