School of Information Management & Systems.   Fall 2000.
142  Access to American Cultural Heritages.   Buckland.

Exercise 3: The World Wide Web. Due Sept 26.
The World Wide Web (WWW) uses images, color, and lots of "links" from individual words and images to other www documents ("web pages"). This exercise is to assure minimal skill is searching ("surfing") the World Wide Web. A browser (e.g. Netscape) is software for finding and using WWW "pages" at "websites", which usually have a basically hierarchical structure, but are sometimes searchable databases. The starting point at each WWW site is called a Homepage. Anything underlined is a link to another WWW "page". Use the mouse to place the cursor on the underlined word and click the mouse button (maybe twice). There are usually lots of "links" to documents in other WWW sites.

1. Enter your browser, e.g. Netscape. Find this course's homepage at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is142/f00/
either by entering that address in the Location box or by following links to and from the campus homepage:   www.berkeley.edu

2. Search by following links: Look over the Infosys 142 website if you haven't already done so. From the 142 homepage click on the course Schedule. When is the first exam scheduled?

3. "Drill down" in a hierarchical index: Go to The Librarians Index to the Internet   http://www.lii.org
Find heading "Culture" and click on the subheading for North America "NorA" and look over the items listed. At the end of each item there is at least one indexing term, e.g. "Native Americans", which, if you click on it will lead to a list of all other websites indexed with that heading. Scroll down until you find "African American", click on it. Scroll down to the "Specific Resources" section. Pick any one, click on it to visit it. Which one did you choose?

4. Use a "search engine": Click on the Search button. Use any "search engine", e.g. Lycos or InfoSeek. Try to find something about the Amish (aka the Pennsylvania Dutch), a religous community in Pennsyslvania and nearby states. Enter:   Amish heritage   in the search space box and click the Seek (or Search) button. Scroll down the search result and pick and note one of them: Its title, content, "location" and the date and time you looked at it. If that doesn't work, don't worry. Give up and try putting http://amishbarn.com   in the Location box and pressing Enter.

3. A "virtual" library How about an entire library on the web?: Go to http://www.ipl.org/ Go to the Reference "room" by clicking on "Reference" and find an online source of interest to yourself that is more or less relevant to this course. Write down the URL (= location), date and time you looked, and describe it very briefly.

5. Now you know how to do it, try recreational searching! Find something that interest you? What is it? Write down the address given in the "location" box and the precise date and time of searching.