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The Web as an information source

aka the quality question -- or -- should we bother trying to bring bibliometric control to the Wild Wild Web?

Jesse Shera, it is said, promulgated the Two Laws of Cataloging in an Occasional paper (#131) published by the University of Illinois' Graduate School of Library Science in 1977. These two laws are:

1. No cataloger will accept the work of another, and
2. No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the original work.

There is a WWW catalog corollary to law 2: Six months is about six months too long.

What follows next is opinion. Accept it, reject it as you will.

It is possible to bring bibliographic control to the WWW. We do not yet fully understand how Web documents behave. That means, of course, that we have not fully mapped the change and editing behavior of authors, not have we fully taken into account the vissicitudes of the system.
Web documents appear, disappear, and reappear for all kinds of reasons. The weather, crime, unpaid electric bills, oversight, have all played a role at times in impinging availability. That does not even begin to address author/web master eccentricities.
If Web documents died and never returned, our task would be easier.
If Web documents were never changed, our task would be easier.
Web documents both return and are changed. How we control for that depends in large part on local resources and local requirements. Given unlimited resources, any level of Web document management is possible. No one has unlimited resources. Therefore, one consideration necessarilty has to be: "What can be done."
The second issue is much more complex and carries both theoretical and practical considerations. To what depth and detail should one catalog/index/manage the Web? I would suggest that that decision is a function of both the rate of change any given resources undergoes and the resources available to track those changes as well as the information needs of the user population. How necessary is deep to shallow cataloging. If shallow cataloging will suffice for the user population, well then, meet their needs. If more complex cataloging is required (assuming adequate resources to maintain the accuracy of the tool), provide that.
However, and my bias shows here, even where deep cataloging is desired or needed, IF resources are inadequate to maintain the quality of the catalog, deep cataloging ought not to be done. An outdated and inaccurate catalog is worse than either a shallow one or no catalog at all.

Reading:

T. Almind & Ingwersen, P. (1997). Informatic analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to "Webometrics." Journal of Documentation 53, 404-26.
T. Michael Ciolek, "The six quests for the electronic grail: Current approaches to information quality in WWW resources." Revue Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines (1-4), 45-71, 1996. Available: http://www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/QUEST/QuestMain.html
W. Koehler, "Digital libraries and World Wide Web sites and page persistence." Information Research 4, 4 (June 1999) http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/paper60.html.
W. Koehler,"The World Wide Web as a Third Information Model: Revolution or Old Wine in New Bottles," Conference on Libraries and Associations in the Transient World Proceedings, vol 1, pp. 217-220. Sudak, Ukraine, June 1998.
W. Koehler, "An Analysis of Web Page and Web Site Constancy and Permanence," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, 2 (February 1999), pp, 162-180.
W. Koehler, "Classifying Websites and Webpages: The Use of Metrics and URL Characteristics as Markers," Journal of Librarianship and Information Studies 31, 1 (March 1999), pp 21-31.
L-Y. Pattie, L-Y & Cox, B.J., eds. (1996). Electronic resources: Selection and bibliographic control. NY: Hayworth Press.

Chen, C-c. (1998). Global digital library: Can the technology havenots claim a place in cyberspace? In Ching-chih Chen, ed., Proceedings NIT '98: 10th International Conference New Information Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam, March 24-26, 1998. West Newton, MA: MicroUse Information, 1998: 9-18.
Dillon, M., Jul, E., Burge, M. & Hickey, C. (1993). Assessing information on the Internet: Toward providing library services for computer-mediated communication. Dublin, OH: OCLC Office of Research.
Griffiths, J-M. (1998). Why the Web is not a library. B.L. Hawkins and P. Battin, eds. The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the Twenty-First Century. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Lesk, M. (1997). Practical digital libraries: Books, bytes, and bucks. San Francisco: Morgan, Kaufman.
Pinfield, S., Eaton, J., Edwards, C., Russell, R. & Wissenburg, A. (1998). Realizing the hybrid library. D-Lib Magazine (October).
Tennant, R. (1998). The art and science of digital bibliography. Library Journal digital (October 15, 1998).

Is the WWW something more than it seems? Consider H.G. Wells' World Brain. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,