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Remember librarian? They know information better than you

Jimmy Wales and Wikia Search may be getting all the press this week, but there are resources out there you may not know.

The Wikipedia phenomenon has garnered global attention, with its community of contributors and editing policies for its encyclopedia of information. Much of the attention has lavished praise on the site, but detractors claim its flaws harm the site's users.

Trust comes into play when it concerns information. While Wales has become a minor celebrity as Wikipedia grew, he's no master librarian, and probably very few of the site's contributors hold such credentials either.

This likely motivated Gary Price at Resource Shelf when he commented on the Wikia Search hubbub:

It’s going to be a bit sad to see this project get all sorts of media attention and library/librarian/scholar built and maintained tools with plenty of human editorial influence forgotten.

We have discussed two of those tools, LII and Intute, previously. The Librarians' Internet Index and Intute vet and catalog the content they contain; what they lack in quantity they make up for in quantity.

A couple of services along with these two merit the attention of the information seeker, according to Price. Infomine at the University of California-Riverside, and the Internet Public Library offer searches of librarian-assembled material in a variety of categories.

The IPL also includes globalEdge, a business information portal designed by Michigan State University. It provides links to news, industry profiles, and diagnostic tools to aid a businessperson's research.

These sites have their bright spots, but suffer from some issues. Infomine looks dated, and a link it provided in a sample search turned out to be a dead link. GlobalEdge is slow, not a positive asset in a time when the major search sites return results in a fraction of a second.

The IPL is a joy to navigate and surf. Its clustered search results provided by Grokker provided a lot of options to drill down into an outline of possibilities. The search algorithm isn't perfect, as a query for "heart disease" brought back links to a Neil Gaiman fan site, and one on Taiwan tourism.

While waiting for Wikia Search, the options listed by Resource Shelf may help with one's research. Having content vetted by people who understand information well makes a difference. It will be even better if the rough spots we found could be smoothed.