Deep Web Content

Libraries subscribe to databases of content, like you and I might subscribe to a newspaper or a magazine. Like us, libraries buy these subscriptions based their interests or the interests of their communities.

A medical library at a university might pay for access to highly specialized content about surgical techniques, but that access is limited to their students, staff and professors. A public library might subscribe to a database that provides environmental or business regulation data for their entrepreneurial and business communities. This content is hidden deep within subscription-based Web sites that require authorization. The content is seldom exposed in Web searches, but your library can make some of this hidden content available to you.

Libraries that have set up access to their subscription databases on WorldCat.org, enable their users to search these hidden, licensed databases as well as the print, audio and video collections in the library all at one time. If your library is doing this, you have access to a lot of deep Web content. But the rest of us do not.

And that is the topic of a panel discussion that OCLC has proposed for the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. We've submitted a proposal for a panel on "Discovery, Identity and Rights: Three Deep Web Problems." But we need YOUR "thumbs-up" in order to increase the odds of our proposal being selected.

The selection process closes on Friday, Sept. 4 so please take a moment to visit the SXSW PanelPicker and give us a thumbs up: http://bit.ly/vuPu5. You'll be asked to register, but it's a very simple process.

Help us and a panel of licensing, business and identity experts answer the question: "What if you could search all of the content available to you?"