Reviewed on 14-Nov-1997
Review by Alison McNab
A website from an appropriate scholarly or professional organisation can be a very fruitful starting-point for researching information on the topics such as organisation addresses - or it can be disappointing! The Scholarly Societies Project was created "to facilitate access to information about scholarly societies across the world". The Project was set up in 1993 as a gopher-based CWIS and now lists over 1100 scholarly societies.
In addition to facilitating access to electronic resources of scholarly societies, Project staff feel that it can also play the role of advocate by encouraging societies to set up Internet resources, to make their sites content-rich, and to experiment with Internet provision of newsletters and journals.
The Scholarly Societies Project Home Page
This site is a clear example of good practice in Web creation. It sets standards for the links it includes, and clearly states what its criteria for inclusion and exclusion are. Concern about rapidly-changing URLs for societies listed at the site has led them to create a Stability Index for URLs. The section on Subject Disciplines Ranked by URL-Stability Index is particularly interesting, as the Library & Information Science websites listed only attain 25% on the URL-Stability Index.
The site includes informative essays on related topics such as how societies interact with commercial publishers. Resources listed on the website can be searched or browsed] by subject category.
Reviewed by: Alison McNab
Academic Services Manager, Loughborough University
Email: A.S.McNab@lboro.ac.uk
URL: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~lbasm/
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on 14-Nov-1997