Browsing is the oldest Web navigation technique. Subject directories such as Yahoo! and the 'Open Directory Project' were among the first collections of links grouped by subject that made it possible to navigate the Web easily.
Subject directories are normally compiled by human editors, and offer a selection of quality websites on a subject. A selection of the best directories is given below.
General Subject Directories
- Open Directory Project - http://www.dmoz.org
- The ODP or DMOZ (Directory Mozilla) was the first large scale volunteer project on the Web. It consists of many international/language versions, all edited by human volunteers. The ODP currently contains over 5 million sites, collected by 96079 editors in over 1 million categories. Its quality is highly regarded, also by web search engines. ODP can be found on Google and Gigablast and in many other places.
- Yahoo! Directory - http://dir.yahoo.com/
- The commercial competitor of ODP and the start of one of the most successful web companies. Yahoo used to work with human editors as well, but that is probably not the case anymore. A very nifty feature of Yahoo! Directory are the clues for other subject specific directories, e.g. Dictionaries
- The Internet Public Library - http://www.ipl.org/
- A good collection of Web Resources selected, annotated and maintained by students in Library and Information Sciences.
Academic Subject Directories
- Intute - http://www.intute.ac.uk/
- Intute has 4 main areas: Science & Technology; Arts & Humanities; Social Sciences; and Health & Life Sciences. The database contains just over 100,000 records. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write good summaries of the resources. Standardized keywords from different thesauri, such as the CAB Thesaurus or Mesh Headings are added to the descriptions and facilitate browsing the collections. Additionally, Intute offers some excellent subject specific training training guides to improve your web searching skills.
- Infomine - http://infomine.ucr.edu/
- A similarly broad scholarly directory, developed and supported by the Library of the University of California, with contributions from othert American universities and colleges. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.
- Internet Scout Project Archives - http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/index.php
- This is the oldest academic directory. The Scout Report was created already in 1994, and still continues to come out weekly with a new issue full of interesting Websites. The archives contain around 28,000 critical annotations of selected Websites and mailing lists.
- Pinakes - http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html
- Pinakes is a directory of academic directories maintained by the Herriot Watts University Library.
- Biology browser - http://www.biologybrowser.org
- BiologyBrowser, produced by Thomson Scientific, is a free web site offering resources for the life sciences information community.
- BUBL LINK Catalogue of Internet Resources - http://bubl.ac.uk/
- A Catalogue of Internet Resources from the Centre of Digital Library Research, covering all academic subject areas. Topics are organized according to the Dewey decimal system.