Friday, April 9, 2010

The Invisible Web or Deep Web, Part 6 -- Toronto Public Library -Webpages created on-the-fly

When the present building of Jarvis Collegiate was built in the early 1920s, a booklet of thirty pages was published entitled Jarvis St. Collegiate Institute 1807-1922 : programme of the laying of the corner stone of the new building at Jarvis and Wellesley Street 



The Toronto Public Library has a copy of that booklet. Now, you know that you can go to the TPL website and look up book titles, so it should be there, right?
  1. First let's try looking for it using Google. You have the title of the book, so do an ordinary Google search for it. Did you find it?
  2. If you didn't find it, maybe you need to be more specific. Repeat the search at Google's Advanced Search page but this time in the box marked "Search within a site or domain" enter the TPL domain: http://catalogue.torontopubliclibrary.ca. Wouldn't it be odd if Google couldn't find the book? For a fact I know it is there.
  3. Could we be wrong? Let's check the TPL site at http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/. Search for the title there.
    Did you find it?
    Which library branch is holding it?
    What was the exact date and time of the laying of the cornerstone of our school?

    But here's THE BIG QUESTION - If this webpage is on the Internet, why can't Google find it?
  4. Go back to the Wikpedia article on the Invisible Web. Look at the section entitled Deep Resources. Which of the seven items in the list probably explains why Google couldn't find our TPL page?
  5. As you study the list of seven Deep Resources, can you think of webpages you've seen that might fit any of those categories?