As the author of Best Bet Internet points out, learning to use the Internet, and learning to use it to find information for research, are two completely different things. The first may take a matter of minutes or perhaps an hour or two, whilst the latter may take a great deal longer and involve a considerable amount of effort and skill. In fact, what with all the new directories, databases, and other tools which appear regularly on the Internet, perhaps it is a continuous process. It is a process which very much interests library and information professionals, who are the primary target of this book. Anyone else with an interest in quality networked information, and also researchers who need to conduct thorough literature searches, will also find this text very useful indeed.
The large search engines, such as Alta Vista, can be extremely useful tools for locating information on the Internet and are very popular with both casual and experienced net users. Alta Vista receives millions of hits every day, and I use it more than any other resource in order to answer general reference enquiries. To her credit, however, Kennedy does not begin Best Bet Internet with an analysis of search engines, because as well as being valuable finding tools, they can also be frustrating to use and often produce long lists of resources which then need to be checked. Instead, Kennedy chooses subject trees as her starting points. Subject trees are compiled by humans, often subject specialists and/or information professionals, and are usually the best Web sites to visit when exploring a subject broadly as opposed to looking for a quick answer. She looks at BUBL, CyberDewey, Galaxy, and, of course, Yahoo! Kennedy casts a reasonably critical eye on each site under discussion, pointing out, for example, that Yahoo! contains plenty of dead links, and that the different sections of the WWW Virtual Library vary in overall quality, but more advice on when to choose one subject tree over another would be welcome. This is especially needed in the light of the large amount of duplication found in the contents of subject trees. Without such advice, there is a tendency for books such as this one, which overall describes about 500 quality Internet sites, to become rather more of annotated directories than manuals.
There is no denying that Kennedy has done her homework, and has unscrambled several complex relationships between resources which have changed names, or merged with similar services, which might defeat a lesser investigator. Best Bet Internet is peppered with screen dumps, to which have been added informative and sometimes fairly lengthy captions. A number of non‐American resources are featured. I mentioned BUBL, above, and I was delighted to read what Kennedy thinks of the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), of which I am the Services Manager, but, as usual with such texts, more European, Asian and Australian sites could have been mentioned. This is particularly true of the section dealing with government meta‐sites, which includes details of various excellent US directories and searchable catalogues, but for individual countries merely points towards the relevant part of the Yahoo! directory.
Before Kennedy became a librarian, she was a journalist. Although, on the whole, journalists “discovered” the Internet after librarians, they have found it to be a natural environment in which to research their work. With her background knowledge, Kennedy has been able to write a strong section describing the best media sites to be found. This is followed by a chapter about the major search engines, in which the author, helpfully, discriminates between the various services. Gluttons for punishment will even find details of parallel search engines and search engine collections in a separate chapter, though I have to admit that my eyes began to glaze over as I looked at the list of Internet search engine programs such as Webcompass, Webseeker, and Webferret, which followed.
Other chapters cover how to find e‐mail addresses, how to exploit mailing lists and newsgroups, the use of Gopher, WAIS, FTP and other protocols, finding software and seeking help. The remainder of the book includes tips on using browsers, some good advice on evaluating Internet resources, and in an appendix, some checklists, notes on citing electronic resources, a glossary and a bibliography. Apart from rather glossing over the use of bibliographic databases as research tools, Best Bet Internet is a very thorough work. I imagine that many librarians will, like me, want to have a copy on their personal reference shelves and another copy for general library use.
