Freelance Writing Jobs | Today's Articles | Sign In

Searching the Web

Lesson 2: Using General and Specialized Directories

Specialized Directories to Explore

Ready? Set? Specialize!

As you learned in Lesson 1 and experienced in the previous section of this lesson, general directories cover a very wide group of topics, with no focus or emphasis given to any one area. A specialized directory, on the other hand, focuses in on a very specific topic, field, or discipline. To offer you a few examples to explore, an alphabetical list of specialized directories follows.

Site Name	Focus/Discipline	URL (Web Page Address)
Academic Info	Science	http://www.academicinfo.net/subsci.html
Architecture Week	Architecture	http://www.architectureweek.com/links/
ChemDex.org	Chemistry	http://www.chemdex.org/
Educator's Reference Desk	Education	http://www.eduref.org/
FirstGov.gov	U.S. Government	http://www.firstgov.gov/
Federal Citizen Information Center	Consumer issues	http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/
HealthFinder	Health	http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Newslink.org	Media (newspapers, radio, magazines, resources)	http://newslink.org/news.html

Finding Other Specialized Directories

The list of specialized directories above is by no means complete, or even semi-complete. There are possibly dozens of others for you to discover. So how do you go about finding a specialized directory? You use the Internet, of course! Here are some sites that will help you find other specialized directories.

Academic Info: http://www.academicinfo.net/

InfoMine: http://infomine.ucr.edu/

Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/

When searching in the above resources, look for your subject as you would for any other purpose, and keep your eyes open for sites that look like they could be directories. Be sure to read through the descriptions. Sometimes these resources are identified as “Subject Guides,” "Directories," or "Gateway Pages."

Try this!
Using what you learned in this section, see if you can find specialized directories for the following topics: