Page 211 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes A companion directory to Literary Market Place is the International Literary Market Place. This
annual directory covers the international publishing industry, with nearly 15,500 entries for
entities in 180 countries. A single volume in print, International Literary Market Place is organized
in broad sections: publishing, manufacturing, book trade information, literary associations and
prizes, book trade calendar and library resources.
Entries are arranged alphabetically by country and contain basic contact information, key people,
and a brief narrative description. An industry yellow pages section covering publishers and
supporting companies is available at the end of the directory. Both Literary Market Place and
International Literary Market Place can be found as a Web-based product called
LiteraryMarketPlace.com from Information.

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
12. Both librarians and library users are interested in information about publishing and
publishers.
13. An industry yellow pages section covering publishers and supporting companies is
available at the start of the directory.
10.6 Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search
engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories
where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files
in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to
sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most
often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be
impossible to browse thousands of pages for let’s say Computers), search directories are
fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by
humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The
main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is
a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the
wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories
are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some
time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore)
and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search
directory.
The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search
directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done
only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.
Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you
wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site
appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you
increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Example: There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the
most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all

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