Technotes

s (SWA)? The "over 37,000" (National Association of Social Workers, 2001) entries in SWA have typically been the subject of greater editorial control and their existence is more stable. The paper version is published quar terly and the electronic version is updated semiannually. SWA offers more search op tions than WWWRSW. SWA is not free. The subscription for the CD-ROM version (Social Work Abstracts Plus which includes the Regis ter of Clinical Social Workers) is currently $1,205 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:51:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION per year. Aside from the Register, the entries consist of citations and abstracts of scholarly literature (articles or dissertations). The 57,000 entries in WWWRSW are links to publicly available, Web-based materials that have been subjected to varying degrees of editorial con trol and are less stable than the SWA content. WWWRSW is updated daily, it is free, and it provides links to a wider range of materials than SWA, many of which are full text. Social workers need to assess the utility of the sources they use on a regular basis. Old knowledge sources change, new knowledge sources appear and the methods of interacting with all of these sources change. If the user does not keep up with the changes in how a source is used, the utility of the source will likely decline. Database currency and cost are important factors. For instance the WWWRSW team added a new category during September of 2001—9/11/01—that is designed to assist New York City social service workers in responding to recent events. I think it is time that we consider ideas such as Hamad's (2001) pro posed system of university-based e-print serv ers for the peer-reviewed literature. This could potentially reduce costs and offer greater aca demic control of the knowledge production and distribution process. One future task for sites like WWWRSW will be to integrate con tent from such e-print servers. Further, if re cent reports of a massive "invisible web" prove to be accurate, the WWWRSW team will need to design coverage strategies for it (Bergman, 2000). As noted by Sherman and Price (2001), the invisible web contains those: [t]ext pages, files, or other often high quality authoritative information avail able via the World Wide Web that general-purpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages. Sometimes also referred to as the "Deep Web" or "dark matter." (p. 57) Another aspect of a website's utility that we all experience is the percentage of dead links. Notess (2000) reported an average pro portion of dead links of 5% for eight search engines. WWWRSW is consistently main tained at 3%. Figure 1 describes traffic on WWWRSW (which is part of NYU Web) since January 28, 2001. This information was recorded using Wusage 7.1 software (Boutell.Com, Inc., 2001). The three peaks represent increases tempo rally associated with large mass emailings about the site to various groups of potential users. Use between February 4,2001, and October 20, 2001, averaged 473 visits per day. NYU Web has over 120,000 Web pages. During the same time period WWWRSW was the 10th most fre quent entry point into NYU Web (mean rank: 9.95, where l=the most frequent entry point). Is WWWRSW useful for social service workers? Unsolicited feedback that is over whelmingly positive, low percentages of dead links, and the levels of use shown in Figure 1 provide some preliminary evidence that we may able to answer this question affirmatively. Yet, this will remain a weakly supported asser tion until we are able to complete additional research on the processes and outcomes asso ciated with WWWRSW. For development pur poses, it would be useful to understand how and when social workers typically decide to use WWWRSW versus other sources; how they use it; the percentage of time they find useful information; whether they use that informa This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:51:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms