How To Find Free information: Subject Directories

Answered By: Vanessa Sampson

Last Updated: Sep 20, 2018 Views: 86

Examples	General, no selection for quality: Yahoo Academic, selection of resources for quality:Academic Info
What they do	Sites included are chosen and organized by people Organize a limited number of Web sites into categories or hierarchies, such as BIOLOGY -> GENETICS -> HUMAN GENOME DATABASE Often include short summaries or annotations of resources Some select for quality, others include popular or sponsored resources Some cover a broad range of subjects while others focus on particular areas, such as communication studies or geography
Most useful for	Browsing Researching broad topics Pinpointing high quality starting points for academic research
Limitations	Contain a limited number of Web sites (Search engines access many more) Although selected by humans not spider/robots, they are only as good as the people who create them May not select for quality
Where to find	Recommended Comprehensive Subject Directories

Comprehensive Subject Directories on the World Wide Web

Name	Description
Academic Info	Selected for college and high-school students.
BUBL LINK	11,000+ sites. Selected resources for academic subject areas
Encyclopaedia Britannica's Internet Guide	Selected, annotated, and rated sites for academic information.
Infomine [Univ. of California Library.]	100,000+ sites. A rich collection of scholarly resources.
Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII)[Librarians in California]	12,000+ sites. A rich collection of scholarly resources.
Multidisciplinary WWW Subject Directories for Scholars	More selective directories.
Open Directory Project	2,600,000+ sites, 360,000+ categories. Strong in science and technology.
Yahoo	1,000,000+ sites, 25,000+ categories. Good for company listings, popular culture. Searches title and category terms, not keywords.