At least there's WorldCat.

Reading "Indexing the Invisible Web: A Survey" was very disturbing, because I know that so much of that invisible web is made up of valuable library-provided content. Even a Google search for "Daughter of Fortune book Tulsa Library" doesn't return any results indicating whether or not the library owns Daughter of Fortune. I get a few links to the TCCL website, but all to seemingly unrelated pages, like the African American Resource Center. As far as I can tell, this book, nor the author, Isabel Allende, are mentioned anywhere on this page.

Our collection is invisible.

But, there's hope, right? The authors say that some web sites attempt to categorize invisible web sites, and that samples are given in the Appendix (Ru and Horowitz 2005, 251).

I decided to check out some of those sites. Now I'm worried that all hope is lost.

I like the idea behind Digital Librarian, but it's just lists. Good lists, but lists. As far as I can tell, you can't even search the site. So, it's sort of like a group of pathfinders. It's like a web bibliography. (I'm sure someone has already coined the term "webliography," right?) Clicking on several of the organized links, I didn't really see how it aided in access to the invisible web. Digital Librarian provides an expertly chosen list of web sites in an organized structure, but those sites didn't really seem to be "invisible."

Randomly, I chose another site from the appendix: Invisible Web. Sounds promising, but a visit to the home page is immediately greeted by that scourge of the Internet: pop-up adds. Subtract a few credibility points there...Once you get past those, the main part of the window is taken up by sponsored links (eBay, MSN--not exactly "invisible" stuff...). I spent several minutes on this site, and I never came across anything that didn't look like pushed commercial content.

The home page for the Invisible Web Directory simply says that it is being refurbished, check back later.

Those just happened to be the first three I selected, so I felt a little disappointed. I also see that Librarians' Index to the Internet is listed, which is credible and searchable, and even warns you when a suggested site may have pop-ups.

Further into the reading, "technologies for searching invisible web sites in real time" are described (Ru and Horowitz 2005, 257-261). These seem to have much more promise. It reminds me of some of our earlier readings, where we discussed the need to bring the search engines to the content, rather than bring the content to the search engines...you know, instead of trying to bring the mountain to Mohamed. Or did I get that backwards?

"The Terrible Twos," on the other hand, was a fun little summary for the end of our semester. I've been wondering for a long time what Ajax and API were, but just hadn't looked them up yet. This might have also been a good introductory article for the class, since it quickly went over so much of the terminology we have discussed. I found several things in this article that I need to add to AmbientLibrarian.

That reminds me--I knew that the wiki pages created by MediaWiki were dynamic, and that they were more difficult to index. I also knew that the ? contained in the URL could be problematic. Ru and Horowitz have now stressed for me what a potential findability problem this could be for AmbientLibrarian. Searching for other help topics for MediaWiki, I occasionally came across:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_a_very_short_URL

I seem to remember that each time I saw these articles, my thoughts went something like this: "Oh! That's a good idea!" *read, read, "uh....," *read,* "huh?" *read,* "Ouch, my brain." Maybe that's something I'll be able to figure out after the semester. You know, instead of celebrating the Holidays.