Subject Directories

Subject Directories tell us what is available by subject and where to find it. Also called Subject Trees, Subject Indexes, Web Catalogues or Web Guides, they provide a hierarchical view of subject categories. Like the subject catalogue in the library, they are usually the work of people, often expert in the subject area, who can evaluate the content of an Internet site and classify it.

Subject coverage can be very broad, including all manner of subjects from the Arts to Social Sciences. The Open Directory Project is one of the largest with 4.6 million links organized into 590,000 subject categories (February 2009). There are also subject directories that are specific to a discipline or subject and have been prepared by subject specialists.

Most directories include some annotation about each site. Directories prepared by librarians, such as ipl2 in the US, or Intute in the UK, are reliable sources for better sites. Checking these first can save you search time.

Channels

Yahoo, MSN, and some other portals will use a subject approach to present an organized list of content areas. Topics are very high level - Autos, Health, Finance. A section may carry a variety of resources including news headlines, special content, recommended sites, discussion forums, software, and anything else that might seem relevant to that topic "channel". Yahoo! also offers speciality channels. (See Everything Yahoo!)

The Pros and Cons of Using a Subject Directory

Advantages

Disadvantages

• Directories, even the academic ones, are no longer well maintained. Keeping the listings up-to-date adding sites and introducing new terms is very labour intensive and expensive.

• Sometimes it is difficult to decide where to look. How deeply should you drill down through categories? You might expect to find a listing of Banks under Companies, but discover, after some travail, that it is in a sub-category to Financial Services.

• The indexer might have used different terms to describe a topic than you use. For information about support for the elderly, should one look under seniors, aged or something else?

• Indexers do make mistakes. Yahoo once classified a McLuhan Connection site under Entertainment: Comics: Cartoonists. Marshall McLuhan might have been amused but his disciples would not.

• Some subject directories are strongly commercial. Yahoo, as an example, charges for inclusion. This doesn't mean that the listings will be inferior, but they may be incomplete or biased.

To use effectively

Search and browse. Most directories have a search box. Enter one or two words then browse the results and the categories they fall in.

• Decide on the subject of your search. If you are planning a trip, your subject will be travel plus the destination.
• Eye-ball the subject index looking for broad categories that might include the subject of your search.
• Use the search facility to find the appropriate categories and some possible sites and then browse. For example, kenya safaris.
• Think of some synonyms. Hotels might be under accommodation.
• When you find a site that you like, note the words that were used in the category. You can reuse these later when you use a search engine.

Social Bookmarking

Many people use online bookmarking services for saving bookmarks and sharing their discoveries with other people. In saving a website or page, people can tag the items with terms meaningful to them. Over time a person will create a "tagosonomy" particular to their needs. In a sense, the collection of bookmarks is analogous to a personal subject directory. These tagsonomies do not have the rigour of the established subject categories used at subject directories, but they do reflect the language and interests of thousands of users.

del.icio.us is the most popular of these. More on this later.

Where to next?

Get some practice with directories in the Subject Directory Exercise.