Herb Somers's List: Digital Libraries

even years ago, Michael Bergman estimated that 500 times as much public information was available on the web as was accessible via web search engines, and that over half of that existed in topic-specific databases. A user is three times more likely to obtain quality results from a search of this deep web than from a search of the surface web via common search engines [Bergman, 2001]. The advent of web-accessible databases has made it possible for users to perform tailored searches over selected high-quality materials. However, traditional search engine crawlers are not equipped to create the concatenation of query parameters needed to functionally retrieve the desired objects from each of the multitude of variant databases [Sherman and Price, 2003]. Unless links are located on a s

Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA, knew that libraries all over the world had been digitizing their holdings. But he was frustrated by the difficulty finding what he was looking for -- in particular, Medieval manuscripts. A Google search for "Edward the Confessor" might turn up 20 pages of results before the book, the oldest surviving Anglo-Norman history of the king, appears; it's at Cambridge University, and they've put it online.