The Scout Report is one of the more venerable publications evaluating the World Wide Web. Having been in existence for nearly four years, it is the flagship publication of the Internet Scout Project, a resource sponsored by the National Science Foundation to provide awareness about valuable Internet resources to the education community.
Essentially, The Scout Report is a weekly current awareness reader’s advisory that consists of evaluations and summaries of WWW sites that a team of librarians, educators, and content specialists deem to be authoritative and of value to the research and education community. This team searches the Web and filters through hundreds of new site announcements daily to create these reviews, using core selection criteria in ascertaining whether a particular site is suitable for inclusion in their report. These criteria consist of:
content (accuracy, audience, scope, currency, etc.);
authority;
information maintenance (updates, availability of an archive, etc.);
presentation (site organization, navigation, text and graphics, etc.);
availability (currency of links to the site, as well as those from the site);
cost.
In addition to this more general subject focus, The Scout Report also provides three subject specific publications, concentrating on sites that are of interest to more specific audiences in the social sciences, science and engineering, and business and economics. The Scout Report can be accessed at The Scout Report Web site (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/ report/index.html) in both HTML and PDF formats. It can also be delivered to your desktop via regular or HTML mail. Their Web site has both a graphical or text version available and is well organized and easy to navigate. Complete archives of 5,672 critical summaries are available in an HTML format. However, their PDF format archive wasn’t as comprehensive and contained a gap in recent issues. Of further interest are The Scout Report’s bimonthly compilations which separate their summary of resources into eight subject areas (arts and humanities, business and economics, law, medicine and health, science and math, social science, network tools, and weekend scouting) and make them available in either bimonthly or complete lists.
In addition to this browseable archive, The Scout Report also features Signpost as an enhanced browsing tool and searchable database. The Scout Report Signpost offers three primary methods of access to their site, allowing the user to:
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search by using either a quick or advanced interface;
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browse content by Library of Congress subject headings;
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browse content by Library of Congress classification.
Signpost uses Excite for Web Servers search engine technology which supports keyword searching, Boolean operators, and phrase searching. The quick search essentially searches for the occurrence of words throughout the full‐text of The Scout Report summaries and sorts search results by confidence level (composite ranking) or by subject. The Advanced Search utility allows searching of up to eight indexed fields simultaneously, including resource type, resource location, and primary URL. It also enables the user to control the search results display and sort order. The first of two enhanced browsing features in Signpost allows users to browse an alphabetical list of Library of Congress subject headings which display and link to all The Scout Report summaries cataloged under these headings. It is also possible to browse these summaries by using the Library of Congress classification, for those comfortable with this taxonomy. This organizes the collection into 21 broad subject categories which are then linked to a list of subdivisions for that subject area, creating a hierarchical browsing schema. These methods of access afford the user a very comprehensive means for accessing the thousands of summaries that comprise The Scout Report site. After using the search engine at various times of day, the one and only negative comment would be that server response time, on average, could be slow in responding to database queries. Reaching over 100,000 people weekly, The Scout Report’s summaries are typically more complete, and the informational content is of a higher quality than those of other sites that attempt to identify and evaluate quality in WWW sites, such as Magellan and Lycos Top 5%. While certainly meeting its goal of being a reader’s advisory of quality sites for the education and research communities, anyone having to sift through a myriad WWW sites in search of authoritative, accurate information is encouraged to visit this site. Because of its robust search functionality and browse features and adherence to its thorough site selection process, The Scout Report certainly lives up to its motto, “surf smarter, not longer.” This site comes highly recommended.
