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About these Pages

The Virtual Reference Desk has grown out of my work as a reference librarian. Hundreds of Internet sites have been identified for their usefulness in research. Original abstracts are being written for each of these sites to enable users to identify the contents of the site, and so that the Search engine will pick up on words in the abstracts.

The philosophy in these pages is to maximize the notion of hypertext. Most Web pages fail to utilize the strength of HTML: the ability to hyperlink to related topics. Instead, they organize their pages according to a strict hierarchy. Every effort has been made in the Virtual Reference Desk to maximize hypertextuality. Other sites rely mostly on search engines. The problem with this method is that it calls upon the user to supply the correct input.

Much effort has been put into assigning subjects to each of the Websites. A hierarchical Thesaurus of subject descriptors was created to guide the user to broader terms, related terms, and narrower terms. Each subject has its own page with relevant parts of the thesaurus structure delineated. After that is a listing of the sites for that subject with a brief annotation. Users can either click on the title of the site, going directly to that site, or can click on the "Full Record" button and read the abstract for the site together with the subjects assigned to the site.