More Reading & Resources, Page 4

Adoption on the World Wide Web

Most Web sites are run by amateurs, either adoptees or adopters, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they are of poor quality or unreliable. Others are operated by adoption agencies, orphanages, social services departments, pressure groups, research institutes, etc. A few are the personal Web pages of individual adoptees, birth parents or adopters.

Adoption Web sites are extremely variable. Some are primarily interested in venting their owners’ frustration or anger at a system which has failed them, or wanting to share their joy at becoming an adoptive family with the world. Others are commercially oriented, selling books, cards, intermediary and legal services, etc. Others provide emotional or practical support for families pre- or post-placement or in trouble, linking them to sources of help. Others provide information for professionals.

UK Adoption Agency Web sites

In the UK almost every adoption society has a Web site, but they are extremely variable in how much information they offer prospective adopters. One city in the south of England, to judge from its official Web site, doesn’t run an adoption service, because there is no mention whatever of adoption anywhere, although I know they do have a service. One Scottish voluntary adoption society has a Web presence which consists of a single page in the diocesan Web site, and the text of that page is a verbatim reprint of a four-year-old magazine article. One Welsh local authority’s adoption information on the Web consists of nothing but the contact details of their children’s services department. One Scottish local authority seems to think that a two-page PDF document is all they need to publicise their services. On the other hand, some agencies have more extensive Web sites, with lots of information, well written and attractively laid out. One of the best is from Wrecsam, in Wales. Islington and Richmond upon Thames, in London, also have comparatively good Web sites. One of the best independent agency Web sites is from Barnardos Derwen Project in Wales. In mid-2003 I made a detailed study of the Web sites of 30 UK local authority and voluntary adoption agencies. The general conclusion is that even the best agency Web sites leave a great deal to be desired in terms of the amount of information they provide and the way they present it. The complete report is available free in the February 2004 issue of First Monday, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/fenton/index.html.

Search Engines

There are several different ways of accessing information on the World Wide Web. For the ordinary citizen looking for information or support about adoption matters, the main sources of information will be individual Web sites and the different kinds of Communities or E-groups. The question is: Where do you go to find these Web sites and Communities?

Search engines are like the index at the back of a book, or a mammoth library catalogue, except that they index many millions of different Web sites. They usually operate by using a “spider”, which is a special computer program which endlessly trawls silently and systematically through the Internet, copying the entire contents of millions or billions of Web pages, and indexing them word by word. Some search engines restrict themselves to Web pages from specific countries or which are about specific subjects. Others exercise some kind of quality control over the sites they cover, or operate only over Web sites which have been submitted to them (by the sites’ creators or by agencies paid to do this on their behalf), but others index everything they can find. When you submit a query to a search engine it looks up those words in its vast word index and spews out a list of the Web sites which contain any or all of those words, depending on how to formulate your query. You read the very short entries for these Web sites and click on any that interest you. The best UK list of major search engines is probably the government-sponsored http://www.hero.ac.uk/reference_resources/internet_search_facilities473.cfm from NISS, the National Information Services and Systems. For a well-nigh exhaustive list of search engines from all over the world, try the Search Engine Colossus.

Most search engines have no way of distinguishing between the different meanings of words, such as “reading” (part of the verb “to read”) and “Reading” (The English city) and “Reading” (an American railway company). For adoption and fostering this is a real problem, because both words have important meanings unrelated to what we are looking for: adopting legislation, adopting donkeys, adopting a pseudonym; fostering good relations, Fosters lager, etc. You can get around this by sheer hard work, using extra words to reduce the number of “hits” (Web sites retrieved by the search engine in a search), or using a specialist search engine, directory, or gateway.

There is a dedicated adoption search engine, Adoptionsearch.com, which also includes a hierarchical directory of adoption-oriented web sites. I am unsure whether the search engine covers the entire Web with a spider or only those Web sites included in its directory, so I would not rely on Adoptionsearch.com alone.

When using a search engine, one option you have to reduce the number of irrelevant hits is to restrict your search to Web sites from specified countries, or in specified languages. I would recommend against this. First, because there is no necessary link between where a Web site “lives” and either its content or its Web address (called its URL, or Universal Resource Locater). A Web site about Armenian history could be compiled by a man in Switzerland and have a URL from Samoa. In particular, millions of Web sites based in other countries use American Web addresses. So restricting your search to URLs including “.uk” (showing a UK origin) in their URL could miss a lot of useful information. And I have found from experience that whatever mechanism search engines use for deciding which language a Web site is in doesn’t work very well. Web sites are missed which should be found, Web sites are found which should have been omitted, and many Web sites have material in several languages.

© Roger Ridley Fenton