As librarians, Project staff felt strongly that it was essential to evaluate resources to be included if the Project was to be useful. It is far too easy to find collections of links on the Internet that appear to be the result of dumping the unevaluated output of a subject search into a gopher or webpage. When there has been no attempt at evaluation of the resources or of imposing some kind of order on the collection, the user is confronted with a confusing jumble of information that has to be traversed.
The Evolution of Guidelines
In the earliest days of the gopher phase of the project, Project staff found a number of society resources that were very difficult to justify including in the Project. Some of these contained information primarily about local divisions of national organizations, which were likely to be of only local interest. Other contained only one kind of information (such as meeting announcements, or a list of executive members) that seemed by themselves to be rather insubstantial. Still others contained rather useful information of varied sorts, but all in one long file, rather than using a menu structure to organize and facilitate access to the information.
So Project staff began to work out a set of guidelines for the inclusion of resources that dealt with the above problems. These initial guidelines excluded local divisions of national organizations. The initial guidelines also required that there be at least two functioning links to different kinds of information about the society. This guaranteed that (1) the resource would have a reasonable amount of richness and substance, and (2) have some semblance of organization.
In the beginning, staff maintained a private set of links to resources that lacked the appropriate diversity or organization, but that might eventually mature.
When the WWW phase began, it appeared that the guidelines for gophers were largely appropriate for webpages as well. These guidelines are now publically available.
A Workspace for the Evaluation Process
In the gopher phase of the Project, a link was set up for each new resource in a private area. The link was then used to connect to the resource, which was then evaluated against the guidelines. If the resource seemed appropriate for immediate inclusion, then the title was standardized to include an initialism in parentheses and the designation "Gopher". The link file was then installed in the public area. If the resource did not satisfy the guidelines, but appeared that it might someday do so, it was left in the workspace area.
In the WWW phase, the same procedure was initially followed, but staff eventually decided to make the workspace area public. We felt that we had nothing to lose by letting users see resources that we were evaluating, so long as we included annotations indicating why particular resources failed to meet the guidelines.
We felt furthermore that some users might find some useful information in some of these resources, even though the resource might not satisfy our guidelines. For example, a user might need only a telephone number for a particular society, and it might happen that that was one of the few pieces of information supplied in the resource. Or a user might be willing to spend time going through a poorly organized (like one long file) but substantial collection of information to find some piece of information.
Finally, we decided to annotate resources in this area to indicate why they did not satisfy the guidelines. This helps impress users with the importance that the Project places on the evaluation process. It also gives the producers of the resources clear indications of revisions that need to be made to qualify their resources for inclusion.
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