I would like to find information on current and proposed attempts that
are being made to organize or catalog the Internet to improve
information access.

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Request for Question Clarification by cynthia-ga on 20 Dec 2005 03:39 PST

Hi dactyl,

Do any of these articles and examples strike your fancy?

Cataloging the Internet: Issues and Viewpoints - by Judy E. Myers
http://info.lib.uh.edu/jem/netcat.htm
This is a fscinating article about efforts to Catalog the Internet.

Cataloging Internet Resources: A Manual and Practical Guide
http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/worldcat/cataloging/internetguide/
Another study in how to catalog the Internet.

Catalog the Internet!
library.nps.navy.mil/home/mlw2000/degroat.ppt

Matrix of WWW Indices - A comparison of Internet indexing tools
http://www.avaloncity.com/info/fprefect/matrix/matrix.htm


Notable Cataloging efforts:

WWW Virtual Library
http://vlib.org/

DMOZ - Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org/
Largest human-edited directory of the web.

The Resource Discovery Project
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/resource-discovery/

Let me know if I'm on the right track.


~~Cynthia

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Clarification of Question by dactyl-ga on 20 Dec 2005 19:27 PST

Yes, these all look like just the kind of thing I had in mind!

I think IT is way past cataloging on or for internet since it provides
access to websites that could have the information being sought. 
Sure, it is not perfect, but it better than a library's cataloging
system, and it doesn't reguire anyone's recognizing, accepting or
adhering to a cataloging system.
Of course, some are more "webadept" (to borrow a Researcher's user
name), but that is what Google Answers is for (and similar services).
Even with an extensive cataloging system, we would need "librarians"
to help us find what we want.
Myoarin

Organize? Catalog?  The Internet knows no such terms, it is a broad
network of many comuters, each holding a web page, and thus each
computer is only a small portion of the whole we call the Internet.

Simply coping all the data from these computers is a daunting task.
There are at least 8,760,000,000 web pages on the Internet (this
particular number is the number of them that Google searched and had
"A" in them somwhere).  Many of these sites change daily, hourly, or
even every minute.

But, we do have caches.  These are when your Internet provider decides
to keep a local copy of a web site you visit often so you don't have
to wait for it to download as long.

And yet we have Google.  The Untimate Card Catalog.  Want to know
about zeppelins?  Type it into Google, I promise that it will have
something relevant.


Look... curently there is no file structure to the Internet - there
never will be any, it's too commercialized with ads thay pay per
visit.  What we do have is a kick-ass system to search for the
relevant information while ignoring everything else.

No.  I do not work for Google.  I was not paid to say this.  The Internet is 
un-organizable, but Google will show you the way.