Hyperlink analysis of the visibility of Canadian library and information science school web sites

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to probe the external visibility of the web sites of all seven ALA‐accredited Canadian library and information science (LIS) schools. The number of inlinks to the schools' web sites is used as an indicator of the visibility of all or some portions of the LIS web sites. Design/methodology/approach – Inlinks pointing to the LIS school web sites were collected using the AlltheWeb search engine. The LIS school web pages pointed to by inlinks were manually analysed to discover visible topics and contents. Findings – Four content clusters were identified by which to group the content of all the inlinked LIS school web pages. These clusters were LIS, research, home page and resources. The most visible cluster was the LIS cluster and the least visible was the research cluster. The most visible topics were student projects/activities, LIS‐related resources and course‐related information, in that order. The home page of each LIS school's web site was shown to be the single web page with the most visibility. Originality/value – This was a comparative webometric study, which collected and analysed inlinks for seven Canadian LIS school web sites at two different times, 3 years apart (2003 and 2006). In the study, the ranking of visible clusters, topics and web pages from the LIS web sites were identified.