Types of Information on the Web

Web sites are constructed by individuals, companies, organizations, government agencies, museums and libraries, and people affiliated with educational institutions. Some of them gather information and images together and can be used like you would use a textbook. Others provide information about a company or organization - what services or products they provide and how to contact them; they may want to sell you something. Government sites often provide access to laws and regulations and forms for conducting business with particular agencies.

You can get some sense of who is responsible for a web page by noting the internet domain of the address. These are some traditional examples:

There are multiple other, less frequent domains, such as .info, .tv, etc. In addition, many foreign sites use a national domain (e.g. ".ca" for Canada, ".de" for Germany, ".bg" for Bulgaria). Furthermore, some countries use two-level domains to differentiate domain types, for instance, ".ac.uk" stands for "Academic, United Kingdom," ".com.au" means "Commercial, Australia," and ".gov.hk" means "Government, Hong Kong."

Before you rely on information found on a web site, do an evaluation of that site similar to that you would do in evaluating a book or journal article. The UC Berkeley Library provides a thorough web source evaluation guide.

Collections of Architecture-Related Sites

You can find links to a number of useful web sites from the Architecture Library web pages. Additionally, there are sites that provide large collections of links that can be useful to browse. Among these are:

• Open Directory Project: Architecture 
  http://dmoz.org/Arts/Architecture/
   
• Boston College Art on the Web: Architecture
  http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/archweb_frames.html
   
• University of Nevada, Las Vegas Architecture Links 
  http://library.nevada.edu/arch/rsrce/webrsrce/contents.html#contents
  
• Librarian's Internet Index
  http://search.lii.org/index.jsp?sm=fr8%3BSubTopic42%3B00http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lii.org%2Fia%2Fdata%2Fdemo1%2Ftopic%23712%3BArchitecture&moreres=SubTopic 

Search Engines

You may wish to look for sites on your own. There are many search engines that allow you to search the web. To get the best results, spend some time reading the tips for advanced searching. Among the search engines available are:

• Google  (includes separate search boxes for images, books, and scholarly material)
  www.google.com
   
• Altavista
  www.altavista.com
   
• Infoseek
  www.infoseek.com

TTU Libraries are not responsible for the content of external sources. For questions about this page, contact Sandy River, Architecture and Humanities Librarian. [v] (806) 742-8058 [f] (806) 742-1964 [e]

This page last modified on 22 May 2007, 14:37.