Specifically, resources which consist almost entirely of links to other resources may have some use in the user community. Similarly, badly organised sites may be better than nothing, e.g. poor image libraries might be better than none in the context of an arts subject gateway. Others would like information providers to contact them with details of new or updated sites when necessary or to make some comments on the resource description made by the service. End-user perceptions of information quality in an network environment One respondent noted that criteria currently used were not validated with reference to their suitability for the network environment or to the subject areas being covered by the database itself. It was generally agreed that robotic gatherers could not be used as the sole arbiter for selection.
Selection is a complex action needing some human intervention.
However, it might be possible for a gatherer to make some 'pre-selection' to which the subject specialist cataloguers could approve and add description. Alternatively, gatherers could be used to retrieve document level resources from sites already acknowledged to be of high quality. If embedded metadata were included in the original resources being described, a metadata aware gatherer could take this information and place it in the relevant parts of the resource description for later approval by the subject gateways. This might speed up the cataloguing of resources. One service suggested some type of automated 'current awareness' service, using automated link and content checkers, to identify new or altered pages on selected relevant sites.