According to current statistics, The World Wide Web now contains more than 100 million websites, 63 billion web pages, and at least one trillion unique URLs. This is a mind boggling amount of information. Is it organized? How does the organization of the library and the WWW differ?
Tim Donahue
5 comments:
That is absolutely crazy to think about how much stuff is out there in the internet. I think a library is much more organized than the World Wide Web. It takes a lot of effort to write an entire book, and not nearly as much effort to type up a web page that isn't necessarily true. There is a lot of information on the internet that isn't checked by a reliable editor for correct information. Anyone can put a web page up as long as they know how to do it. The library has a very precise system of organizing all the information contained within its walls. You never know what you're going to get on the internet.
As Jesi said, most anybody is able to get anything from a single piece of information to multiple web pages placed somewhere within the internet ether. This “information,” in many cases, doesn’t have to be veritable, may only be one person’s opinion, and the sole purpose may be to smear, slander or incite. There is not even a level of acceptability expected for most of us if we’re aware of the aforementioned caveats. The only recourse for someone looking for a reproducibly, verifiable, source of information is to know the sites, authors, and/or sources. Even armed with this knowledge it behooves us to trace the site and links unless what we’re looking at has previously been peer reviewed or is known to review all articles/books etc.
The arrangement of all this material that grows each day by astronomical numbers is almost an impossible task, particularly for a single entity. We have reached a place with the www that soon will require some form of “policing” or agreed upon convention along with a concerted effort to organize, We would benefit greatly with some form of organization and though the effort of Google is laudable and helpful we need something more with all the “bits” of information out there. A model somewhat like what our libraries use LCC/ISBN etc. is a possibility. I feel the near future of information technology will only become more exciting than recent years. That is if the present world situation improves.
The information that is listed within the World Wide Web is not organized in the way that libraries are organized. As we have learned in class, libraries are organized by various systems (i.e. Dewey, Library of Congress) that appear the same no matter which library you go to (as long as they use the same system). The World Wide Web contains millions of websites that contain information that anyone can publish, but without the organization that you see in a library. Websites contain hidden "metatags" that search engines can use to tag a website for your search, or they can use any word found on that site to display as a search hit. Search engines can display information gathered from the World Wide Web in any way that they want! This makes it very confusing when searching for information unless you know exactly how your keywords are being searched for and exactly how to search for those keywords. In a library, it is pretty simple to go to a certain subject section and browse, or search, for your book by title. Although this is an, arguably, slower method of finding information, it is much more organized than the Web.
Mike Pasque
I believe the web is a lot faster but the information is always so massive and not always what you are looking for. Compared to a library where it might take longer to look up but you are getting the exact information on the topic of your choice. Also on the internet there is a lot of information that is not always correct, it being from and unreliable source. Anyone these days can put up a website. So until the internet figures out a way to give you the correct information and have it be the truth, i have to say that i will stick to the library :)
I knew that the web contained an incredible amount of information, however, these numbers are mind boggleing. In my opinion this information is not overly organized. It is sometimes very difficult to find certain information on while using the web. Especially when you need to make sure this information is credible. Organization of the library and WWW differ because there are library cataloges that tell you exactly what information is avaiable and where it is located. These cataloges are not available on the web.
Post a Comment