Subject gateways should aim to describe the best resources that the Internet has to offer in their field and for their target audience. They need to:

• point to the highest quality networked resources currently available
• point to new networked resources as they appear

Finding high quality resources on the Internet can be a time-consuming job - which of course, is exactly why gateways exist - to save the end-user some of the time and commitment required to discover and retrieve high quality information on the Internet.

Locating resources to add to your gateway will require one of the biggest investments of staff time and effort, and so it is important to find efficient and effective methods of working at this task:

• gateway managers need to ensure that systems to support resource discovery are in place
• individual gateway staff need to develop their own strategies for locating as many high quality resources as efficiently as possible

Gateway managers will need to provide the systems and strategies to support efficient resource discovery within their team.

Resource discovery is labour-intensive and efficient strategies can help to maximise the number of resources added to the gateway. This section suggests some of the systems that managers can put in place to support efficient resource discovery within the team:

1. Avoid duplicated effort.
2. Find the right people for the job.
3. Provide training in resource discovery.
4. Set up support systems for resource discovery staff.
5. Set up systems to encourage your user community to suggest resources.

1. Avoiding duplicated effort

Duplicated effort can be wasted effort. There are issues of duplication:

• between gateways
• within the team

Avoid duplication with other gateways

It is worth finding out whether other gateways already describe Internet resources in your field. If there are other gateways you have to ask yourself whether it really makes sense to spend time and effort cataloguing the same resources twice. If existing gateways are already describing resources relevant to your users you should consider:

• collaboration with other gateways (to avoid cataloguing the same resources twice)
• cross-searching your gateway with other gateways so that your users can search more than one simultaneously
• sharing metadata records

Co-operation between gateways

Avoid duplication within your team

Time can be wasted if members of your team are all trawling the same sources. Consider developing a team strategy for resource discovery. For example by:

• giving people different subject responsibilities - so they are each hunting for resources in a different discipline
• giving people different monitoring responsibilities - so they are each monitoring different sources (email lists/URLs/current awareness services etc.)

2. Find the right people for the job

It will be financial and political considerations which determine whom you can take on to do the job of resource discovery, as with recruiting staff for cataloguing.

Subject indexing and classification, Distributed cataloguing

Volunteers?

Pros: may be cheap and plentiful

Cons: may be inconsistent and unreliable in their contribution and it may be difficult to find volunteers with the subject expertise to select the high quality resources you want

Subject specialists?

Pros: may know of the best sources to use to discover relevant resources for your gateway and should be able to assess resources effectively, given their subject knowledge.

Cons: may be expensive, short of time, difficult to recruit and unable or unwilling to spend time cataloguing

Librarians/information professionals?

Pros: have training in selecting resources to meet the information needs of users and also may be able to catalogue resources in addition to selecting them, since they may have training in cataloguing/information retrieval issues.

Cons: may be expensive/difficult to recruit

R E M E M B E R Internet skills can be taught more easily than subject expertise! Librarians may be more willing and able to catalogue resources than to discover them

3. Provide training in resource discovery

The Internet is always growing and changing, so there are always new tips and hints to be learned in Internet resource discovery - training staff can improve skills and effectiveness. Training may include:

• offering lists of sources for staff to use
• offering demonstrations and hands-on work with different resource discovery tools
• brainstorming ideas within the team to share resource discovery strategies

4. Set up support systems for resource discovery staff

The following are ideas for support systems for resource discovery staff:

• create Web documents that list resource discovery strategies appropriate to your gateway
• set up a mailing list for resource discovery staff so that the team can share knowledge of any useful new sources or techniques they find - and so they can talk about issues that arise
• set up meetings for resource discovery staff to share stories of successful and unsuccessful strategies which they have found.

5. Set up systems to encourage your user community to suggest resources

Why not let the resources come to you! Encourage your users to send you details of any sites which they think should be added to the gateway. You will need:

1. to publicise an email address or Web form for submissions
2. to publicise your scope and selection criteria

Quality selection

Web forms are great because they encourage users to generate the appropriate metadata - and they may have good ideas about keywords and descriptions make sure your selection criteria are freely available, to try to discourage inappropriate resources from being submitted and to make it clear that not all submissions will be accepted a quick thank-you message to users is good PR and can encourage them to submit again. If you are getting a lot of submissions - create a standard courtesy reply publicise the fact that you welcome submissions from your user community. If you run an email list associated with your gateway, (***CROSS REFERENCE publicity and promotion) you can send out occasional reminders to subscribers

Gateway staff do the 'leg work' for SOSIG users - joining the lists, monitoring the sites and doing the searches that many users do not have the time to do, filtering out items that are of poor quality or irrelevant to the users.

It's easy to waste time when surfing the Internet - gateway staff need to develop efficient and effective strategies for locating high quality Internet resources. Some strategies are suggested below.

Resource discovery tools and methods

1. Browsing strategies
2. Mailing lists and their archives
3. Distribution lists and current awareness services
4. Search tools
5. Newsgroups and discussion forums
6. URL-minders and Web agents
7. Non-Internet sources

1. Browsing strategies

One of the richest sources of resources will be existing Web pages - especially authoritative ones in your field which list related or recommended resources. Trawling these sites is the equivalent of citation pearl-growing or snowballing, traditionally done by researchers looking for references - if they find one useful resource, they will follow the references from that resource to find others.

Trawling home pages of known experts

If you know of experts in your field, do a search to see if they have their own Web page. You may find that:

1. They have published their work on the Web.
2. They have collected a list of links (and, given their knowledge and expertise, they will be worth checking out!)

Bookmark any that look as if they may be developed over time, so that you can check them again in the future.

Trawling organisational home pages

Many organisations now have their own Web sites. These can be useful in two ways:

1. They may include primary resources for you to catalogue.
2. They may have lists of links selected by people with subject knowledge which you could trawl.

Consider which organisations are relevant to your audience and try to keep in touch with developments concerning them.

Take time to do a search for the most relevant organisational sites for you and organise them in a bookmark folder, so you can take a look at them periodically. Only bookmark the best - you won't have time to trawl too many.

If you are creating a gateway for an academic audience then it can pay to monitor university Web pages. Look for:

• library Web sites - as many librarians are now building collections of Internet links
• academic departments' Web sites - where lecturers and researchers may publish their work or may create lists of links

Trawling subject-based sites

Many sites have a section of 'links' which can be mined for new resources. The better quality the original site, the better the related links are likely to be:

• find the most important sites in your field and look at all the links they recommend
• look for 'What's New' or 'Latest News' features on trusted sites
• bookmark these link pages or 'What's New' pages to check regularly, or consider putting the URLs into a Web Agent or URL-minder (see below) so that they can let you know when anything new is added

2. Mailing lists and their archives

Joining and monitoring email lists/checking mailing list archives

People often use email lists to announce new resources they have made available on the Internet.

You have two possible strategies here:

1. Joining the lists and reading messages via your email
2. Bookmarking the Web archives of the lists (if they have them) and making periodic checks on them

Don't join so many lists that your own email becomes unmanageable. If you can, filter your email so that messages from lists don't get mixed up with all your other mail. For very busy email lists it is probably more time-effective to make a regular scan of the archives. Set up a bookmark file for 'Archives to Check Regularly'

Subject-based lists

If you can find a list that is relevant to your subject area and audience, you have a rich source. In the early days it's worth doing a search for relevant lists and asking colleagues to recommend them.

Generic email lists that announce new Internet sites

A number of email lists exist to alert people to new Internet sites. Be warned - these lists can be prolific!

3. Distribution lists and current awareness services

Internet current awareness services come in different forms and are becoming more sophisticated. Free email subscription services will send you updates, bulletins and email publications on a regular basis. It may be worth subscribing to services that are run by key individuals or organisations in your subject area. Other services are emerging where you can create your own personal profile on the Web, which the service then uses to email you incoming information that is likely to interest you.

4. Search tools

Searching the Internet can be time-consuming, since many of the search tools retrieve huge numbers of hits which take a lot of time to work through. However, searching can be a good strategy in some cases:

• targeted searching, i.e. looking for a specific resource
• building up a specific section of your collection

In our experience, search engines can be a waste of time if broad search terms such as 'social psychology' are used. Highly focused searching based on known sources, however, can be fruitful. For example, if you have a list of well-respected journals or organisations in your field, you could search for them by name, to see whether they have a presence on the Internet. A number of hints for finding the leads for focused searching are recommended:

• use other sources, e.g. directories, to find things to search for
• use a subject-specific site to get lists of dates/organisations/names to search on
• search for Internet equivalents of printed materials, e.g. scholarly journals or academic publishers
• search for specific dates or people
• search for important organisations to see if they are publishing anything of value on the Internet
• use leads from your knowledge of the field

Search Engines

These are good for finding LOTS of information and for finding very precise pieces of information (so if you know exactly what you're after they can be very effective).

Get to know how to use one search engine very well, rather than lots of them very badly. Take time to read the Help pages for the search engine and learn how to use the Advanced Search options.

Be aware that search engines change over time and that different ones are more effective for searching for different types of information - do some research to find the best one for your needs.

Bookmark complex searches so that you can run them again periodically to see if anything new has appeared.

5. Newsgroups and discussion forums

Internet discussion forums are a powerful and fun way to communicate with people around the world who are interested in the same things as you. Thanks to the Internet's rapid growth and the exploding popularity of the World Wide Web, people from all walks of life now participate on a regular basis.

6. URL-minders and Web agents

Some free Web services exist that help you to monitor changes made to Internet resources or to inform you of new sites that might interest you. You register the URLs of the sites you wish to monitor or search queries you would like to have done and the service sends you an email whenever a change is made to these resources or the search yields new results.

Remember that these are automated services and will not always yield high quality results.

Remember that the more URLs you register, the more email you will get - so don't set up more than you can cope with! If you can, set up email filters to separate these messages from the rest of your mail.

7. Non-Internet sources

You don't have to use the Internet to learn about Internet sites. Consider using non-Internet sources:

• talk to people - your users/experts in your field/Internet enthusiasts and get their recommended sites
• look at the bookmarks of these people if they publish them on the Web - if not, then ask them to let you get access to them another way
• scan printed publications e.g. specialist journals, newspapers, newsletters, magazines
• watch out for URLs - which are increasingly appearing everywhere from billboards to TV to the side of cornflake packets!

R E M E M B E R It's chaos out there so don't expect resource discovery to be without its problems: expect information overload and develop systems to manage it effectively let serendipity play a role be open to adopting new strategies and changing your old ways - the Internet is always changing be open minded - take the Alexander Fleming attitude - there may be millions of petri dishes containing nothing more than a load of jelly, but keep your wits about you - what looks like a mould may turn out to be penicillin!

New gateways may have different priorities for resource discovery from mature gateways as they will be focussing on developing a core collection very quickly. New gateways may want to consider the following issues:

• target efforts to make sure that you include the most important resources first
• balance the collection to ensure you have at least a few resources for all the subject areas you cover
• divide responsibilities among your team
• don't duplicate other gateways
• be absolutely clear of your scope and selection criteria before you start the resource discovery process

Mature gateways will have already developed a core collection and may have widened their scope. Staff will need to adjust their resource discovery strategies in line with this. Mature gateways may consider the following issues:

• collection management - you need to ensure that all the different subject areas within your collection are growing at the same rate - target efforts at areas that are falling behind and require development.
• ensure that all areas of the collection are comparable in quality
• focus on strategies for finding new resources AS THEY APPEAR
• build your community - to encourage more submissions from users and information providers

Quality selection; Changing your selection criteria over time

DutchESS Dutch Electronic Subject Service
EEVL Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library
EUNI List of European Universities, provided by Adminet in France
SOSIG Social Science Information Gateway
URL-minder a service based in California, USA, twhich enables you to track changes made to Web sites and URLS

College and University Home Pages (world-wide), http://www.rirr.cnuce.cnr.it/universities/univ.html

Dejanews, http://www.dejanews.com/

The Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences, http://www.n2h2.com/KOVACS/

DutchESS, http://www.konbib.nl/dutchess/

EEVL, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/

EUNI - List of European Universities, http://www.ensmp.fr/~scherer/euni/euni_list.html

The Informant, http://informant.dartmouth.edu/

Library and Related Sources, http://www.exeter.ac.uk/~ijtilsed/lib/wwwlibs.html

Liszt, http://www.liszt.com/

Mailbase, http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/

Mind-it, http://mindit.netmind.com/

NewJour: Recent Issues, http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/nj2/

Search Engine Corner, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue19/search-engines/

Search Engine Watch, http://searchenginewatch.com/

Manchester Metropolitan University's Department of Information and Communications Search Tools, http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/main/search.htm

The Social Science Research Grapevine, http://www.grapevine.bris.ac.uk/

SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk

What's New in WWW Social Sciences Online Newsletter, http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/main/search.htm

'What's New' on the Web server of the European Union, http://europa.eu.int/geninfo/whatsnew.htm

A. S. McNab & I. R. Winship, How to find out about new resources on the Internet, The New Review of Information Networking (1995), 147-53.

Association of Public Data Users and International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST), Strategies for Searching for Information on the Internet.
http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/www_searchers.html

TERENA & M. Isaacs, Internet Users' Guide to Network Resource Tools, Addison Wesley Longman: 1998

E. Worsfold, Finding Internet resources for SOSIG - strategies and sources, 1997
http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/esig.html

Chapter author: Emma Place

With contributions from: Lisa Gray (OMNI), Debra Hiom (SOSIG), Linda Kerr (EEVL), John Kirriemuir (OMNI), Roddy McLeaod (EEVL), Kate Sharp (Biz/ed)