About Scout Report Signpost

The Scout Report Signpost research project has ended and has been replaced with the Scout Report Archives. To access the Internet resources from the Scout Report publications, please go to the Scout Report Archives. The Scout Report Signpost site is no longer being updated - this site is being maintained for demonstration purposes only.

The Internet Scout Project, which is funded through the National Science Foundation and is located in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Computer Sciences Department, is charged with assisting in the development of resource discovery on the Internet. The Scout Report Signpost was a research project developed by the Internet Scout Project from 1996 to 2000. The primary goal of the Scout Report Signpost was to demonstrate that Internet Resources could be cataloged, classified, and arranged using existing controlled vocabularies and taxonomies such as the Library of Congress Classification Scheme and the Library of Congress Subject Headings in concert with the Dublin Core metadata standard. The Scout Report Signpost database contained only the best Internet resources, as chosen by the editorial staff of the Scout Reports. Signpost and its replacement, the Scout Report Archives, was designed to guide U.S. higher education to quality electronic resources. The majority of resources reviewed are free and freely accessible. More detailed information on Scout Report selection criteria is available.

The lessons learned from the Scout Report Signpost research have been applied to the Scout Report Archives. A few of the original features of the Scout Report Signpost have been carried over to the new Scout Report Archives, including the ability to browse by Library of Congress Subject Headings, fielded searching in the Advanced Search section, and links to the full critical annotations from the Scout Report and the subject-specific Scout Reports in which the resources were originally reviewed.

In addition, the Scout Report Archives has several new features that distinguish it from the Scout Report Signpost. The Excite for Web Servers search engine previously used for Quick Search has been replaced with a ht:/dig search engine. In addition, the Scout Report Archives permits users to search and browse the collection of Internet resources reviewed in the Scout Reports using C.Y.R.U.S. (Classify Your Resources Using Scout) Classification, a subject hierarchy developed by the Internet Scout Project.

Several articles have been written about the Scout Report Signpost and related research at the Internet Scout Project:

Glassel, Aimee. "Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?" InterNIC News (March 1998). Complete article available at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/enduser/archive/1998/euc-9803.html
Glassel, Aimee and Amy Tracy Wells. "Scout Report Signpost: Design and Development for Access to Cataloged Internet Resources." Journal of Internet Cataloging 1, no. 3 (1997):15-45. Abstract available at http://www.haworthpressinc.com/jic/jic1nr3.html
Roszkowski, Mike and Christopher Lukas. "A Distributed Architecture for Resource Discovery Using Metadata." D-Lib Magazine (June 1998). Complete article available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/scout/06roszkowski.html
Wells, Amy Tracy. "A Scout Report Signpost Look at One Aspect of Metadata - Resource Type." InterNIC News (November 1997). Complete article available at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/enduser/archive/1997/euc-9711.html
Wells, Amy Tracy, Susan Calcari, and Travis Koplow, eds. The Amazing Internet Challenge: How Leading Projects Use Library Skills to Organize the Web, Chicago: American Library Association Editions, 1999

If you would like to go to the new Scout Report Archives, click here.

-- Internet Scout Project Staff, November, 2000