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The X.500 Directory Service is one of the most important tools ever produced for network users. It is the enabling mechanism for a revolution in communications among people worldwide. Initiating the service, however, can be fraught with problems—not the technical challenges of creating a globally distributed service with locally managed controls, but concerns raised by the very existence of a worldwide database of information relating directly to individuals. Opportunities opened up by the use of the Directory are inevitably accompanied by the possibility of misuse. Individual subjects of the information have divided views. They earnestly wish for easier contact with colleagues and others worldwide, while entertaining in varying degrees a fear of invasion of privacy or a violation of personal rights. Managements taking responsibility for their staff and students are reacting with caution to requests for information for inclusion in the Directory. These concerns must be taken seriously, or the service will fail—either by not reaching the critical mass that will make it useful, or by quickly becoming out of date and therefore irrelevant. Prospective Directory Service managers must lake considerable care to present the service in a reassuring way to their subjects and administrators, to convince them that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks, that controls exsist, and that responsible Directory use will benefit the world network community.

This is a selective guide to social service agencies in the U.S. which publish directories of their services. It is meant to assist collection developers in public, academic, and private agency libraries. A total of 154 agencies were contacted by mail and asked to complete a survey form. Twenty letters were returned, marked “no current address.” Fifty agencies returned the questionnaires and/or sent samples and other descriptive information. However, some organizations' information was insufficient or indicated that the agency/organization was inappropriate for inclusion. Only those that provided complete information are included.

Over the past decade machine‐readable data bases have grown both in number and variety. In addition to the familiar bibliographic data bases such as MEDLINE and ERIC, one now finds data bases containing such things as properties (e.g., RTECS ‐ Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances) and full text (e.g., LEXIS, a family of files that contains the full text of court decisions, statutes, regulations, and other legal materials). As data bases increase in importance as information resources, there is a growing need for printed tools which can assist librarians in their identification and use. Available tools fall into three categories: (1) guides issued by data base producers which describe the contents of a given data base and methods of searching (e.g., INSPEC Database Users' Guide); (2) guides produced by online vendors which indicate how data bases can be searched on a particular system (e.g., Lockheed's Guide to DIALOG ‐ Databases); and (3) data base directories which include coverage of data bases produced by many different organizations and processed by a variety of online vendors. The third category is the subject of this comparative review. Readers interested in the first two categories should consult Online Reference Aids: A Directory of Manuals, Guides, and Thesauri published by the California Library Authority for Systems and Services (CLASS). This publication contains information on manuals, guides, and other search aids for over 100 online data bases, including those available through the New York Times Information Bank, National Library of Medicine (NLM), Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS), Lockheed DIALOG, and System Development Corporation (SDC) ORBIT. This directory is arranged by data base name, giving ordering and price information for aids available from both data base producers and online vendors. Subject and vendor indexes are also provided.

Identifies key activities that network users can perform in order to use the network effectively. Offers recommended reading, from beginner to expert user status. Explains some commonly used terms (e.g. Turbo Gopher with Veronica!). Lists useful Internet resources.

A method for improving the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine by employing a website directory, e.g., Yahoo! Japan directory or Google directory, as a concept dictionary is proposed. A user can examine the results of a search engine from the top rank as usual except that he/she is assisted by a suggestion about which webpages are worthy of examination. To make a suggestion the conceptual closeness of an unexamined webpage to a query or to each of the webpages that a user has been interested in is calculated via a website directory. The proposed method was evaluated on the search results of Japanese Excite.

Despite the increased importance for companies to control their intangible assets, little empirical research has been made on the linkages between single and distributed cognition in organizations. In this paper, the transactive memory concept is extended and adapted to examine the antecedents and consequences of directory formation in the Nordic subsidiaries in Japan. Value congruence, psychological safety, organizational commitment, and interpersonal and electronic communication are proposed to have a positive impact on directories. The directories are proposed to have positive linkage with service capital. Regression analyses show that the most of the independent variables have a statistically significant relationship with directories. Further, interpersonal communication mediates the impact of value congruence and psychological safety to directories. Directories were also found to have a positive relationship with the service capital.

The purpose of this paper is statistical examination of nearly 7,000 web directories and an analysis of factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank.

The authors analysed 6,821 directories registered at www.katalogiseo.info/. The following information about the directories was examined: the year of registration on the website, the directory’s PageRank value, the existence of an active IP address, backlink requests, a fee charged for submission to the directory, as well as directory moderation and subject. Statistical analyses were performed with the use of Microsoft Excel, version 2010, and R software, version 3.0.0. The PageRank values were collected with a software written in Python.

The study has shown a gradual increase in popularity of directories as one of the basic tools in search engine optimisation. The analysis has indicated a relatively high percentage of spam web directories. The evidence of this is the number of directories with undetermined PageRank values. The study revealed that careful management of a directory and its subject have key impact on directory quality measured by PageRank.

Relatively few publications focus on the problem of web directories which represent a very large group of websites created solely to manipulate web search engine rankings. This paper discusses the phenomenon of web directories, reveals the percentage of spam directories, and factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank.

This is the eighth article on business and law (BSL) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles have appeared: one covering science, technology and medicine (STM) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 20, no. 4 and the other covering social science, humanities, news and general (SSH) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 20, no. 5. The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).

An OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Directory Service has recently been standardised in accord with the CCITT's X.500 recommendations. This OSI Directory (or X.500 Directory — the terms are used interchangeably) was developed with the priMary intention of providing support for electronic mail services, address look‐up of networked applications, and also white and yellow pages directory services. However, the OSI Directory has many of the features required for providing access to widely distributed bibliographic information. It offers the possibility of a unified bibliographic information framework; homogeneous access to bibliographic information; built‐in facilities for distributed searching; ‘natural’ integration with other OSI services which may be used to provide bibliographic services, for example, electronic mail and file transfer. This paper first provides a brief tutorial on the OSI Directory. The paper then considers how the OSI Directory might be used to provide access to a range of bibliographic information, and be used in tandem with other OSI services to allow the retrieval of documents. The paper then examines some of the problems of providing access to bibliographic information given the current version of the X.500 standard. A project (ABDUX — Accessing Bibliographic Data Using X.500) to investigate some of the ideas described in this paper is being funded by the British Library, and the paper notes the goals of this project.

This column has always intended to provide indepth, comparative reviews of abstracting services, indexes, serial bibliographies, yearbooks, directories, almanacs and other serial tools which would normally be housed in reference departments. For the purposes of this column, reference serials are materials which must meet two rather flexible requirements: they must be useful as reference sources and they must be issued as serials or be titles which are superseded periodically by new editions.