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Monica Brinkley: Based at the Department of Library and Information Studies, University College, Dublin, Ireland.
Mary Burke: Based at the Department of Library and Information Studies, University College, Dublin, Ireland.
Introduction
The Internet, which began as primarily a communications tool, has become a very important information resource. The amount of information accessible via the Internet and the range of topics covered has grown to mammoth proportions. An increasing number of ever-more sophisticated tools has been developed to aid the retrieval of information from the Internet, for example Gopher and the World Wide Web (WWW).
The literature relating to the Internet is plentiful and we have no desire to add to the hundreds of guides and introductions already available both in book and article format. For example, Rick Gates published a series of such articles in the journal Electronic Library in 1993, and another series of articles by Greg Notess appeared in the journal Online in 1994. Kehoe's (1993) book Zen and the Art of the Internet is something of a classic among the introductions to the Internet. A more up-to-date guide would be Finding it on the Internet by Gilster (1994). This article attempts to bring the Internet literature a step further - away from introduction and description and towards evaluation. This is a report of an assessment of the principal tools available for the retrieval of information from the Internet, which was based on criteria established for evaluation of traditional information retrieval systems such as online public access catalogues (OPACs) or bibliographic databases. It is expected that the reader will have some knowledge of the Internet and its retrieval tools, and the concentration will be on the evaluation rather than on a description of the tools.
Overview of research
The Internet has developed and changed greatly in the last number of years. There has been a move from a small number of technically elegant but not very user-friendly tools towards more sophisticated and easy to use tools. File transfer protocol (FTP), telnet and electronic mail are the original three basic tools of the Internet. Tools are now available which use the technical functionality of these three, but provide a more user-friendly interface and more sophisticated search software. In the study reported here the focus...