Going beyond Google: The Invisible Web in Learning and Teaching

The authors, from the Library Media Resources Center at LaGuardia Community College in New York, have produced this book mainly for librarians and others to use in teaching sessions with students learning about searching for resources on the internet. According to the authors, the term “invisible web” was coined by Dr Jill Ellsworth in 1994, since when many organisations and individuals have been working to make this unseen content more visible and searchable. This original reference seems to have joined the invisible web itself as I have been unable to find anything other than mentions by other writers from 1996 onwards.

The authors divide the type of information hidden in the “invisible web” into three main areas: database content; “deep” web sites, such as government web sites and other information which may not be found easily because of their format. They go on to explain the reasoning behind this. Database content may not be found because database records are dynamically created and results are not stored with a permanent URL. Web crawlers generally do not find this information. Deep web sites, such as government web sites, have many levels of information beyond the reach of web crawlers. Other formats such as images and audio or video files may require specialist search engines.

The book is divided into three main sections with additional material in the appendices. The first section, “Understanding the division between the visible and invisible web”, outlines the characteristics of the invisible web and discusses the problem of users who believe that if information is not on the web, then it does not exist. This section includes a review of user studies, which have been carried out investigating the web searching behaviour of users, including the recent joint British Library/JISC report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (2008). This report, along with others, found that searchers typically tend to work horizontally, looking at a couple of pages then “bouncing” out, and also that searchers tended to be satisfied with very basic ways of searching. All the research confirms that students and other researchers love the ease of use of search engines like Google as well as what they see as its convenience and time saving aspects.

The second section, “Finding and utilizing the contents of the invisible web”, deals with ways of introducing students to the concept of the invisible web and suggested activities for librarians and other teachers to use in information skills sessions. The authors suggest taking students through basic searching followed by further activities; for example, asking students to compare search results for “solar energy” from Google and INFOMINE (http://infomine.ucr.edu), the US‐based Scholarly Internet Resource Collections web site.

The final section, “Narrowing the gap between the visible and invisible web”, reviews the progress various organisations are making with providing ways of searching the invisible web as well as the tools on offer to help with this, such as Google Scholar and Google Book Search (now known as Google Books). Other initiatives include next generation library catalogues, for which various US academic examples are cited, federated search and non‐commercial initiatives such as the Open Archives Initiative (www.openarchives.org) and the Open Content Alliance (www.opencontentalliance.org). Appendix B lists suggested resources for teaching the invisible web; I sampled some of these and, despite the lengthy URLs, found that they are all still live. Appendix C gives the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Standards, which are used in the book to map the searching concepts.

At 155 pages, I feel that the price of £44.95 is on the expensive side, but this price seems to be in line with other similar titles published by Facet Publishing. Inevitably, the book has a distinct US bias, which means that some of the suggested tools may be less useful to UK users. For example, the Librarians Internet Index (www.lii.org) is suggested as a subject gateway, but since it is provided by Californian institutions may not be as useful to a UK user as a resource such as Intute (www.intute.ac.uk). However, the suggested activities for use with students would form a very useful template for anyone who is designing a course of this kind for their students. I am looking forward to adapting and trying out some of these activities.