WorldCat search

For this week's post I am searching WorldCat for web design information. WorldCat is not great for getting information immediately because it is a catalog of library catalogs and thus returns items that the searcher does not have access to. However, for the same reason it is great for getting information on what the research community is interested in or answering the question: "How much information is there on...?"

Accordingly, my objective in this search is to find out whether there exists a lot of information on 'writing for the web.' My textbook included a short section on what writing style is appropriate to effectively convey information on a website, but I want to know more. Specifically, if it turns out that a lot has been written on this topic it will tell me that writing for the web is probably a lot different from other forms of writing and that I should learn more about it so that my web page will be informative and easy to understand.

As the screenshot below shows, I started with a fairly simple keyword search of writing AND (web OR internet). I also specified materials from the last 10 years since this topic is likely to change rapidly.

My initial results were too broad. For instance, they included many style manuals, whose records, reasonably, include "writing" and "internet" (as in "how to cite an internet resource"). However, among the first couple of pages of results I did find some relevant hits so I took a look at those to see if I could use a pearl-growing strategy to figure out some more specific search terms. Below are the WorldCat subject headings for three promising hits:

"Writing for the Internet: A Guide to Real Communication in Virtual Space":
 

"Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability":



"Web Copy that Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time":


Although these results do have some subject headings in common, they are not specific to web writing. Instead, the common descriptors are broad ones like "Web sites -- Design." However, "Online authorship," from the first result, looks a bit promising. So I tried a subject search for that:


We've got about 200 results, which is not a lot for a giant PAC like WorldCat. However, the first search established that there are a significant number of other potentially-relevant resources not under that subject heading and the fraction of results from the subject search that are relevant is high, as the subset shown in the screenshot below demonstrates: