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Journal of Women's History 11.3 (1999) 176-187



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Getting to the Source
The World Wide Web of Resources for Women's History

Heather Lee Miller


It is no secret that the Internet has become one of the most ubiquitous venues known to humans (and computer viruses) for the dissemination of information. The Internet is limitless, and for scholars it has the potential to provide unprecedented access to an amazing array of sources and scholarly work—not to mention entertainment. Yet, because of its scope, the World Wide Web (WWW) can be daunting, often to the point of exasperation. Not only is there a large amount of erroneous, extraneous, and occasionally offensive information to be found on the Internet, but snarls of links also often lead to unproductive (albeit interesting) tangents which for some may eat up hours of precious time. For those of us comfortable and practiced in text-based library and archival research (which at least appears to have visible parameters and possibilities), the Internet's myriad search engines and directories, shifting or obsolete websites, and seemingly endless links makes one wish there were a guide to relevant sources, or at least a basic road map to potentially useful avenues for the scholar. This article is intended as a step in that direction for those who have little familiarity with the WWW. While it can only scratch the surface of available Internet sources for women's historians, I outline here some ways in which the WWW can be used in research, teaching, and professional development.

Searching the Internet

For the novice, getting acquainted with the Internet is perhaps best begun on sites that provide topical links—often called directories or catalogs. Organized thematically, directories are limited collections of sites that may be browsed. They are best suited for broad queries—for example, "history." Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and Excite (www.excite.com) are two popular directories. If you want to look for history sites on Yahoo!, go to the front page (type in the address or "URL" [uniform resource locator] at the top of your web browser's screen), click on "Social Science" in the directory, then "History" in the next directory. You may then choose to access history sites by region, subject, or time period, or other more specific categories, including archives, education, journals, and U.S. history. At each one of these increasingly specific points, webpages are also listed (lists of websites are now commonly referred to as "webographies"). You may choose to continue researching in the directory by narrowing your [End Page 176] topic, or you may visit the webpages given at that point. For example, you may choose "History's Best on PBS" (www.pbs.org/history), which provides companion sites for PBS historical documentaries that include teaching guides, time lines, and bibliographies. Directories are not comprehensive (in other words, they do not include every Internet site that pertains to your topic), but they might provide a number of relevant sites.

Search engines or indexes differ from directories and are better suited to narrow, specific queries—for example, "medieval French women's history." Such search engines as AltaVista (www.altavista.com) use robots to "read" the full text of websites for keywords and then compile lists of those sites in which the words were found, ranking them by their statistical relevance to the search (how many times the words appear, how close to one another they appear, etc.). Although directories and search engines perform different functions, most directories are also search engines, providing access to information in both ways. Some metasearchers, such as Dog-pile (www.dogpile.com) and MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com), search multiple smaller engines and then list the most relevant results from each.

It is important to remember that when using search engines you must use as specific search terms as possible or you will turn up millions of sites, many of which will not be germane to what you are looking for. A search for "women" on AltaVista, for example, produces almost seven million related...

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