Dictionaries and the Deep Web

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     There were a lot of topics covered in the third theme of this course. I think that the most interesting articles I read during this theme were the ones dealing with the deep web. The deep web was very eye opening to me. I knew there were schematics that narrowed down the websites and information that appeared when a search was performed, but the amount of information that is out there and not really accessed is mind blowing. According to Bergman, “The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web”.1 I can’t even really wrap my head around the number that is 500 billion web pages, so in that regard, I am actually very glad that the algorithms exist to narrow the search down for me. Otherwise, people would spend so much time sorting through websites and information that they would never find what they are looking for. The images that Bergman used in his article really showed the difference between the surface web and the deep web in a clear and easy to understand manner.

                                                 


    As we progressed through this theme, I found that the one that really stood out to me as being useful for my own school library were the articles on Biographies, Bibliographies, Dictionaries, and Encyclopedias. This is an area I would like to focus on updating and weeding in my school library. I have already started adding updated and age-appropriate biography books, but I need to focus on our dictionaries next. The sets we have in our school would be classified as under Reidling’s category of descriptive, where “few rules are absolute; different societal and cultural situations offer their own rules.”2 Our dictionaries would be considered descriptive because they contain some slang and ‘newer’ words.  I also found myself off on a tangent after the articles about dictionaries, reading about Dr. W.C. Minor and how he contributed so much to the Oxford English Dictionary from his cell in a mental institution for the criminally insane. Fascinating!

I don’t know why I had never considered the school library catalogue as a bibliography, but it makes sense in that it is a database of all of the resources in a library. Altering my mindset in this area helped to clarify why there are so many rules and standards when entering MARC records and renewed my dedication to consistency when formatting them. 

I had never really thought of indexes and bibliographic databases as having much of a place in an Elementary School Library, but it was really interesting to see how they played such an important role in libraries in general. Through the Focused Education (ERAC) website3 our district does have access to the EBSCOhost databases, as well as Explora, and NoveList. 

Unfortunately, these resources are not very well advertised, and I don’t think that many classes are using them. I do like these online databases because they are up to date and have much more relevant information for students than our old and outdated print reference materials. The online sources definitely beat out the print resources in many of Katz’s resource evaluation categories, especially in the areas of Scope, Style, Recency, Arrangement and Entry, and Format.4

Overall, it has been interesting to look at the wide variety of different reference materials that are kept in school libraries over the duration of this course. There is a lot more involved in sorting through and weeding old dictionaries and encyclopedias than just age and the condition of the book. This information will be very useful in my decisions about which resources to keep and which to discard.

 

 

 

1Bergman, Michael. (2001). White Paper: The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value. Journal of Electronic Publishing. 7. 10.3998/3336451.0007.104.


2Riedling, A. M., & Houston, C. (2019). Chapter 6: Dictionaries and Encyclopedias. In Reference skills for the school librarian: Tools and tips. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, an imprint of ABC CLIO, LLC.


3Admin. (n.d.). BC Digital Classroom Access. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://bcerac.ca/bcdc-access/

 

4Katz, W.A. (2002). Introduction to reference work, volume 1: Basic information services. (8th edition). New York: McGraw-Hill.



Comments

  1. Aaron MuellerNovember 29, 2020 at 7:06 AM

    Thank you for your final reflection. This was a good overview and highlight of the key topics, new learnings, and better understandings of our course explorations over the last few weeks. Good connections to our course texts, some key readings and your own further research.

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  2. KimberlyP@LIBE477November 29, 2020 at 4:03 PM

    I agree that the theme of the Deep Web was an eye-opening one! I always thought deep web and dark web were one and the same, so I'm glad I was educated on this topic. Your observation that the digital reference materials are under-utilized at your school struck a chord with me because I think that at my school I may be the only one using them besides the teacher-librarian. I wonder how librarians could better "advertise" these resources better so that they get used more often?

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  3. Ms. ArmstrongDecember 3, 2020 at 11:55 AM

    The deep web topic was eye opening for me too! So crazy how much information is out there. I completely agree that there is more than age to a resource when we are weeding. Dictionaries are still useful, even if they're not current. There is still a lot of useful information in there. I'm really not sure when was the last time my school's dictionaries were updated. They can still be used by students to find terms and definitions though. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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