Did you know that when you search Google, the first website that comes up is not necessarily the one with the best answers? It’s the site that gets the most traffic, or the most visitors. In other words, the information that you get may not be as useful, or even as true, as what you might find on another site. But even given search strategy will usually land you thousands, if not millions of possible “hits.” Who has time to look through that many search results? What can you do, but click on hits on the first few pages, increasing their traffic, and thereby keeping them on the top of Google’s results pages.

But sometimes you find that jewel of a hit. Sometimes there are even sites that are perfect for your project that simply aren’t indexed by the search engines, but you learn about from a friend. That’s where the thrill of research lies… the unexpected discovery. And that’s one of things we are trying to help you find at Hamner Library. We have set up a Delicious account to organize sites that we have discovered. If you have a site you’d like included, please let us know. If you submit enough really good sites, we’ll even train you in how we tag the sites once we save them. Yes, there really is a system, although we usual “regular” descriptions as well as the more formal language of traditional subject headings.

Right now, the collection of sites is heavy on religion and history… that’s because I am converting my personal Delicious links to the Hamner Virtual Library. Help me add links… submit them to me at dbrowe <at> hamnerlibrary.org, bring them to the Library, or simply leave them in a comment after this blog. Just remember that the comments are moderated, so your first comment won’t show immediately. This is your chance to show off the off-beat as well as the traditional sites that you know, love, and more importantly, USE.