Subject gateways: herramientas para el filtrado de contenidos en la world wide web. Propuesta metodológica para su evaluación

摘要

Internet has dramatically changed the ways of communication and access to information. The large amount of information available on the web and the lack of filters for publication imply that people face great difficulties in accessing to high quality information. Deficiencies of Internet search engines and the lack of information literacy bring more restrictions to achieve an efficient access to valuable web resources. To address these problems and provide their users with high quality web resources, libraries have designed and implemented different solutions. Subject gateways are probably the more effective of them because they use all the library background to identify, select, catalog, classify and disseminate internet resources. udThe objective of this research is to carry out an assessment of the quality of subject gateways in the last years in order to detect their strengths and weaknesses, observe their evolution, and identify best practices. For this purpose, we design a specific tool for assessing the quality of subject gateways, which includes 30 items divided in three main categories: access to information, management and value-added elements. The tool was applied to a sample of 30 subject gateways in 2007 and 2012.udWe find substantial differences across the subjects gateways under analysis and that their average quality is quite good in the two first categories but not in the last one. Regarding the temporal evolution, we only observe improvements on valued added services, but they are no significant. ud