1. fulfilling the DESIRE for knowledge Emma.Worsfold@Bristol.ac.uk
Subject Gateways
fulfilling the DESIRE for knowledge

2. Aim of subject gateways
to help users locate relevant and high quality resources on the Internet

3. Subject gateways ... “doing for on-line information resources
what librarians do for books”
Internet search and retrieval tool
database of Internet resource descriptions
selection
cataloguing
classification

4. Information intermediaries
serving specific user groups
identifying information needs
building targeted and quality collections
“trusted third parties” (Clifford Lynch)
filter the Internet
not prone to word stuffing/metadata spamming!

5. Cataloguing Internet resources
(… or creating “human-generated metadata”)
title
keywords
description
URL
up to 60 other attributes

6. Adhering to metadata standards
Dublin Core
MARC
ROADS / IAFA

7. Classifying Internet resources
(organising resources under subject categories)
PSYCHOLOGY
Theories, Laws, Metaphysical Psychology
Experimental Psychology
Physiological Psychology
mental development
sensory perception

8. What’s the difference between a subject gateway and a search engine?

9. Search Engines built by robots exhaustive indexing
automatically generated metadata
high recall, low precision

10. Subject gateways Built by humans selective catalogues
human generated metadata
low recall, high precision

11. An example - SOSIG

12. The UK gateways Medicine OMNI Engineering EEVL Art ADAM
Social Science SOSIG
Business Biz/ed
History History
General BUBL/NISS

13. Other gateways in Europe
The Netherlands (DutchESS)
Finnish Virtual Library Project
Germany
Sweden (EELS)

14. Elsewhere ...
Scout Report Signpost
NetFirst
Any more?

15. What can users expect to see in the future?
Bigger collections
International collections
collections covering all subjects

16. Cross-searching

17. Harvesting Combine Harvester bigger databases
still some quality control

18. Distributed Cataloguing
WWW-based cataloguing
avoiding duplicated effort
improving coverage

19. A Vision for the Future an integrated virtual library for end-users
enabling users to take advantage of subject expertise around the World

20. What this depends on International metadata standards
International co-operation and strategy
The technologies are here - it’s the human factor that needs attention!

21. DESIRE Guidelines on developing subject gateways
Research in Internet cataloguing and indexing
International WORKSHOPS in 1999
“The Information Gateways Handbook”

22. Internet Detective
A Web-based tutorial on evaluating the quality of Internet information