A webometric analysis of ALA accredited US schools' websites

The in-links to 12ALA accredited LIS schools' Websites were analyzed, echoing the suggestion Thomas and Willett (2000) made that hosting a wide range of topics would help increase the visibility of or attract more sitations(1) to a Website. More importantly, these topics should be outreaching and of current value to people outside of the host site. The sites that generated the majority of in-links for the LIS schools are in the ORG, EDU or NET domain. Such sitations are also content-based as opposed to the directory-type references from sites in the COM domain. Based on co-link data, the structure underlying the 12 LIS schools was delineated. Links to the outside world by the 12 schools do not seem quite extensive both in terms of content and quantity. Webometrics offers an evaluation measurement that is not available in bibliometrics when an institution is the analytical unit. Nevertheless, Webometric research must be conducted with caution because both the data source (i.e., Web-based data) and data collection instrument (i.e., Web search engines) have obvious deficiencies.