What is on the Web?

What kind of information can be found on the World Wide Web?

Because the World Wide Web is a self-publishing medium, (meaning anyone with the right equipment and program can "publish" their thoughts, ideas, products, etc.) The sky is the limit for what you may run into on the Web. Personal pages abound, full of photos of friends, resumes, discographies of favorite artists or even a novel someone is writing. Personal pages may also include very valuable and authoritative information. Certain educators, or hobbyists, have compiled and published very helpful web
sources in their area of expertise, showing that they believe strongly in the sharing of good information. As we saw in "Behind the Scenes", many sites exist simply to advertise products. There are, of course, also many reputable organizations that provide information about themselves and their services. So the answer to "What is on the Web?" is a complicated one. Like a people in a community, it has its dependable members, and its "fun" members, as well as its untrustworthy or unsavory characters. Clearly, you will need and use different types of pages for different purposes.

Our goal, focusing on using the Web for Research, is to find the authoritative in the midst of the questionable, and retrieve useful sources from the Web. Many of the Departmental Libraries at UIUC have developed their own internet guides. If you are trying to find Internet resources for a specific subject, one way to begin your research would be to figure out which departmental library serves your area of study and take a look at their homepage. Before we go into the details of the best ways to carry out any Web searches, here are some general topics that should be well covered on the web:

Government
The web is an excellent source for finding information provided by the United States Government, the largest publisher in the world. Statistics from the census bureau and other government agencies are available over the web free of charge. Reports from government agencies, hearings from congress, and speeches from the president are just a few examples of the types of government information that is available over the web. The Government Documents Library has an extensive list of Internet resources on their web page.
Commerce
The web is also an excellent source for finding information about specific companies or corporations. Many companies maintain their own websites. Company profiles, annual reports, and stock information are often available over the Internet. The Commerce Library maintains a list of these types of Internet resources.
News
Many newspapers at both the local and national level are available online. The UIUC Newspaper library maintains a list of Newspapers on the Web.
Full Text Materials -- Classics and Certain Journals
It is important to distinguish between web pages, original electronic materials, and material that has been published elsewhere, usually in paper form, that is now also available on the web. For example, the Bartleby Library contains online full text for many books published around the turn of the century and earlier. Many magazines and journals also publish on the web. Most of the prominent newspapers and journals will at least summarize current issues, but few of them allow free access to the complete articles.
Facts and Recent Information
If you are trying to get information about phone numbers, the weather, the current time in Australia, maps, movie showtimes, airfares, hotel acommodations, dictionaries, quotations, the web can help you. For a quick guide to this type of information, please see the UIUC Reference Library's Online Reference Collection.

Accessing library materials on the web:

If you are trying to find books and other materials at the UIUC Library, you should use the UIUC Online Catalog. As we mentioned, some full-text electronic journals are available on the World Wide Web, but if you are trying to find articles for a research paper, you probably want to use the UIUC Library collection of article indexes and abstracts. Because you are affiliated with the University of Illinois, you are able to access some electronic journals that the U of I pays for. If you want to see what online journals are available to you, please visit the UIUC library Electronic Journals listing. Most of these materials are available only to UIUC students, staff, and faculty. The Web-based article indexes and abstracts are tools that allow you to determine which articles exist relative to a particular topic or field of study. They list and describe articles within journals found in print format. You can then use the library’s online catalog to see if we hold a copy of the journal that you need.

Even though these materials are accessed through the Internet, they should not be viewed as being the same as the free information that you may access through the World Wide Web. The article indexes and abstracts and electronic journals are provided by companies that monitor their products for reliability and accuracy, so the information that they provide is extremely reliable, much more so than the typical web page that is accessible to everyone.


		University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Gateway Comments to: jstraw@uiuc.edu Last updated 10/9/2002 KG