Book blazes path through Internet jungle

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Internet knows that cyberspace is an informational jungle. Despite the presence and success of large commercial indexes and subject gateways like Yahoo!, finding the best, most accurate digitized information on the Net can still be a hit or miss proposition.

A cadre of professional information managers works to make the Internet more navigable. In particular, Internet digital libraries are ruled by the skills and methodologies of the librarian.

It is in this handful of sites — either topical ones like the Agriculture Network Information Center or more general destinations such as the Internet Public Library — where all the skill and organizational expertise of the librarian are brought to bear to give order and objective filtering to the chaos of cyberspace.

A new book, “The Amazing Internet Challenge,” profiles a dozen pioneering sites that have developed critical guides and filters to sort useful information from Internet noise. Edited by a trio of veteran Web and Internet content evaluators from the university’s Internet Scout Project, “The Amazing Internet Challenge” is an invaluable resource to those seeking useful ports to the Internet, and especially those who want to develop web sites and other Internet indexes that take advantage of the wealth of the Net’s good information while filtering out the bad.

In the book, the developers of sites like the Social Science Information Gateway and the Librarians’ Index to the Internet reveal what it takes to build a good digital library. At these sites, selection criteria, evaluation processes, and up-to-speed databases prevail. Edited by Internet Scout veterans Amy Tracy Wells, Susan Calcari and Travis Koplow, “The Amazing Internet Challenge” is available — of course –on the Internet through the American Library Association Online Store, and Amazon.com

For more information, contact Susan Calcari, (608) 265-8042; scal@cs.wisc.edu, Amy Tracy Wells (608) 263-2611; awel@cs.wisc.edu, Travis Koplow (608) 262-6607; koplow@cs.wisc.edu.