Avoiding the "fire hose effect."
The "unfiltered" Internet can be overwhelming, like a fire hose aimed straight at you. Time and effort are required--sometimes in great quantities--to sort out the valuable information from the worthless information. As we progress in our education we develop our filtering skills. We learn to evaluate web sites on criteria like bias, authority, audience, timeliness, and other qualities. But, it still takes time.
Presented below are a handful of web sites that attempt to save you a bit of time and do a great job of filtering the Internet to various degrees. To the right you will see links to web sites that NIC librarians have approved of and think you might find useful.
Web sites on evaluating Internet sources:
ipl2 is the product of the merger between the Internet Public Library and Librarians' Index to the Internet. Not only does ipl2 present a rich directory of web sources on a vast number of subjects, they also offer a question answering service manned by platoons of librarians and knowledgeable volunteers.
ODP is the largest human-edited directory of the Web on the Internet. The content is edited, updated, selected, and otherwise maintained by a large community of volunteers dedicated to the mission of providing access to the best information available on the Web.
About.com is an example of a service that pays it's contributors. This is a service with a vast amount of information created by thousands of people with interests in the subjects presented. A very useful site whose pages populate the search results of many other popular search engines.