Library and Information Science Schools in Canada and USA: A Webometric Perspective

Abstract

The in-links to 53 American Library Association (ALA)-accredited library and information science (LIS) schools' websites were analyzed, echoing the suggestion Thomas and Willett made that hosting a wide range of topics would help increase the visibility of, or attract more, sitations 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. Links to the outside world from the 53 schools, to a certain extent, reveal their connectivity with other sites on the Web. Based on co-link data, the structure underlying the 53 LIS schools was delineated. Webometrics offers a different type of institutional evaluation measurement to what is available in bibliometrics. Nevertheless, webometric research must be conducted with caution because both the data source (i.e., web-based data) and data collection instrument (e.g., web search engines) have obvious deficiencies.