Organizing Online

"The Internet has been likened to a library where all the books have been dumped on the floor and there is no catalog" (Taylor, p. 13).

I am sure that the idea of organizing the Internet and digital information is daunting to even the most enthusiastic of information professionals. Dedicated and forward-thinking professionals are doing just that, daunting though it may be. From search engines to digital libraries, online information is being organized. Who has undertaken this project?

Can't we just leave it to Google?

Google's stated corporate mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (Google, 2008). How realistic is this mission? According to a UC Berkeley study, How Much Information?, published in 2003, the Internet contains about 532,000 terabytes of information (I'm sure this figure is much higher today). Google, and other search engines, are only able to access about 170 terabytes of this information. These 170 terabytes represent the "surface Web," that is, the Web that is publicly accessible. Approximately 92,000 terabytes make up the "deep Web," which includes online journals and scholarly publications that must be paid for. The rest, approximately 441,000 terabytes, is represented by email and instant messaging ("How Much Information?," 2003). Given these numbers, it seems unlikely that Google is going to be able to organize all of the world's information anytime soon.

What are librarians doing?

Librarians, compulsive organizers that we are, have played a significant role in organizational efforts. Librarians have been involved in compiling webliographies, bibliographies of Websites. They have worked on creating Dublin Core: "simple [metadata] standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information" ("Dublin Core,"2008). Librarians at OCLC
have created Connexion, the company's Web-based cataloging interface. Connexion's use of "pathfinders," also called webliographies, allow librarians to organize both digital and traditional resources ("Pathfinders," 2008; Taylor, 2004).

Librarians have also been involved in the creation of digital libraries. Digital libraries are more related to a traditional library than they are to the Internet. Essentially, digital libraries allow users online access to the resources they would have access to in a traditional library. Digital libraries organize information "with such tools as metadata, XML/RDF schemes, ontologies, and taxonomies" (Taylor, 2004, p. 17). For more information on digital libraries, see the timeline I created: History of Digital Libraries.

Great efforts will continue to be made in organizing the Internet and digital information. And yet, I still wonder, is all of this effort necessary? Does the Internet need to be organized? Is it really possible?