Citation
Blum, J.M. (2002), "The Invisible Web", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 283-283. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.4.283.9
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The Invisible Web is an “eclectic collection” of over 1,000 resources that are not entirely visible to general search engines and therefore often go overlooked. The majority of the sites are free, although some charge for content, and others require users to sign in to search for materials. This is a companion site to the same authors’ book, The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See (CyberAge Books, 2001). Sherman is the president of a Web‐based consulting firm, and Price is a reference librarian at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is well known as the Price in “Price’s Lists of Lists”.
The home page is merely a list of categories. Users must click on any one of these categories, which will lead them to a page where they will then choose a sub‐category. This is done through the use of pull‐down menus. This construction wastes some time and makes it hard to see all of the information available. A separate page for each category, with all of the sites divided under sub‐categories listed below would have been more useful. Another downfall is the lack of a search option. Users looking for information on a specific topic must be able to follow intuitively Sherman and Price’s organisational scheme to find information.
The site’s goal emphasises quality over quantity, with the authors making their inclusion decisions just as a librarian would make collection development decisions. Therefore, some categories have very few entries. Some entries are marked with a country of origin. Others are coded “B”, meaning that the site in question comprises bibliographic material.
The entries for each resource give a description generally taken from the site itself. There are also two links given for each source. The link attached to each title takes users to the Web site being discussed. The second link, the Search Form, takes users to a search engine provided by the resource in question. Sherman and Price warn that these URLs may fail to work due to page changes and updates. If this happens, the authors suggest using the first link and navigating to the search page, or adjusting the URL to follow it back to the home page to find the search option.
Due to its clunky construction and limited coverage, this resource is worth a look but is not recommended for general users. People who have read the book, The Invisible Web, may be interested in looking at this site, and therefore it might be useful to include a link to this site in the catalogue along with the book.
This review was first published in Reference Reviews Volume 16 Number 4 2002.