Subject Lists are put together by human beings. They are great places to start, because they assemble resources for you in convenient groupings.

Yahoo! is a very popular subject list. The main listings at Yahoo! are assembled and maintained by people who work for Yahoo! The Yahoo! logo is hard to miss. And it's nearly ubiquitous -- you'll find many Yahoo's in many countries (the first, below, is from the U.S.; the last is from China).

The wonderful thing about subject lists and directories is that they organize Web links by subject. In Yahoo!, you have to scroll down a little bit to get to this, but when you get there, the directory part looks like this:

Click on any of these categories, and you get a nicely organized list of resources. And, the resources have been organized by human beings, not by a computer!

Suppose I were to click on News & Media, and then made selections to find news sources in Turkey. Yahoo displays the choices I have made -- we call it a bread crumb trail.

The Google Directory is similar to Yahoo!, and it also uses bread crumb trails:

Both Yahoo! and the Google Directory are good resources. But they concentrate primarily on providing access to commercial Web resources.

Librarians' Index to the Internet (lii.org) is dedicated to selecting and organizing high quality resources. Some commercial sites are included, but there are many government, organizational, and educational sites. Most importantly, the Web resources included have been selected as quality treatments of their subjects.

The Internet is huge. It is estimated that about 9 to 10 million Web pages are added to the Internet every day. No staff of human beings is going to keep up with providing access to all those resources. That's why there are search engines.

Rules of thumb:

• Use a subject list or directory when you want to explore Web resources.
• Use search engines [What are search engines?] when you want access to all of the Web and have something specific in mind to look for.

To get to a list of the major subject directories, with brief descriptions

1. Go to the Cabrillo college Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>. If you are at an Information Workstation in the Library, just click on HOME towards the top of the screen
2. Click on Search the Internet [fourth icon down on left]
3. Click on Subject Lists and Directories

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
2. Click on Library & Internet Instruction (3rd icon from the bottom, on left)
3. Click on 1. Web Workshops for Fall 2003

Topsy N. Smalley last rev. 10/05/03