1. INTRODUCTION

Libraries are the local gateway to national and global knowledge and with the help of websites and the Internet, information is publicly available to all. People have become more in tune with the Internet, and the curiosity to access information as quickly and easily as possible has increased. Library websites are the primary source of information for finding information, for simply searching on the Internet is considered the easiest way rather than going to the library and finding books from the shelf. In the age of digitization, many libraries have transformed from traditional to digital libraries. Under the National Mission on Libraries, Ministry of Culture, the Government of India have taken the initiative to modernize and digitally link nearly 9,000 libraries across the country to provide access of books and information to potential readers (National Mission on Libraries). The aim of the mission is to transform India into a vibrant knowledge-based society. Culture plays an important role in the development agenda of any nation. The mandate of the Ministry of Culture revolves around functions like preservation and conservation of our cultural heritage and promotion of all forms of art and culture, both tangible and intangible. The functional spectrum of this ministry is wide, ranging from generating cultural awareness at a grassroots level to promoting cultural exchanges at an international level (Ministry of Culture).

The purpose of the present study is to examine the public libraries websites of India under Ministry of Culture and rank them based on web impact factor (WIF). It is all about exploring the present status of link pages, web pages, domain authority, and WIF of the six public libraries websites which are under administrative supervision. Webometrics is an interesting and ongoing area of research in the field of library and information science, as many studies on websites of academic institutions, libraries, organizations have been recorded for many years. The paper is set to identify the most highly visited website, to check out the number of root domains, web pages and authority, number of links, and WIF with the help of an optimization tool (Open Site Explorer), which is a search engine for links.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

Lee and Teh (2001) have evaluated the content and design of 12 academic library websites of public and private institutions of higher learning in Malaysia and revealed that the academic libraries in Malaysia generally have set up well-designed and useful websites, a few of the academic library websites have very simple and basic features. Noruzi (2005) evaluated the WIFs for Iranian universities. The study used Alta Vista search engine and from its output, counts of links to the websites of Iranian universities were calculated. The study found that overall, university websites have a low inlink WIF, which shows a significant correlation between the proportion of Englishlanguage pages at an institution’s site and the institution’s backlink counts. Qutab and Mahmood (2009) investigated the content of library websites in Pakistan and analyzed their navigational strengths and weaknesses. The authors surveyed 52 academic, special, public, and national libraries websites in Pakistan based on a 77-item checklist. The study found that no library website contained all items on the checklist, websites such as Government College University, Lahore University of Management Sciences, University of Punjab, Air University, University of Management Technology, Agha Khan University, Karachi, and Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad have a good number of items included in the checklist, and two items in the checklist were not found on any library website. Joicy and Varghese (2011) evaluated the websites of research and development institutions in India and their study revealed that a majority of the R&D institutions in India provide informative links to contacts, copyright, news and events, Right to Information, and history, but a few websites provide opportunity for user interaction in the form of feedback, and a majority of the R&D institution websites are good for navigating and finding information.

Vijayakumar, Kannappanavar, and Kumar (2012) examined the web presence and links of SAARC countries. The authors used an advanced search facility, i.e., AltaVista for data collection and the study revealed that India recorded the maximum number of 14,10,00,000 webpages, 58,20,000 external links, 1,18,00,000 internal links, and 9,83,00,000 overall links, followed by Pakistan and SriLanka for overall links, countries which are maximally linked to the Indian domain are Pakistan (3,610), SriLanka (2,070), and Nepal (728), and Pakistan also occupied first place to get the maximum of 18,300 links from India comparatively from other SAARC countries. Based on the WIF of external links, Sri Lanka occupied first place with 0.06495, followed by Pakistan and Bhutan; the highest WIF for overall links was occupied by India with 0.6971 and also as per the WISER rank for SAARC countries. Mohamadesmaeil and Koohbanani (2012) studied the web usability evaluation of Iran National Library website. The authors applied library (attribute) method to develop a checklist of 11 criteria and 160 components, and features and also evaluation survey methods were applied too to assess the usability of the website. The study identified the elements that are important in the design of national library websites and indicated that the lowest amount of usability was 6 points for appearance and the highest was 156 points for navigation. Walia and Gupta (2012) conducted a study on WIF of select national libraries websites and their study revealed that among the selected national libraries, websites of national libraries of America, Australia, and Britain were more visible and hosted more content compared to the websites of India, Namibia, and South Africa. Thanuskodi (2012) conducted a webpage content analysis on selected Institutes of National Importance websites in India and revealed that only a few of the institute websites are up to date and the rest of the websites do not mention the time/date in their homepage; regarding general information about homepage features, more was found in IITs and less in both the institute i.e., Indian Statistical Institute and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Based on findings, Thanuskodi also suggested that institutes should provide more services like feedback and a sitemap to view the overall functions. Shukla and Tripathi (2014) investigated the backlinks of the Institutes of National Importance and Premier Management Institutions Library websites. The researchers retrieved backlinks by four search engines, Google, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, and Yahoo Site, and revealed that among four search engines, Yahoo Site Explorer is more reliable, and the index page/homepage of library websites attracts the highest number of backlinks over other web pages of library websites. Chakravarty and Wasan (2015) also analyzed the library websites of higher educational institutes of India in which Google search engine was used for the study, and they calculated the WIF and R-WIF of ten library websites and correlated both the formulas with Spearman’s Rank Correlation and found very little difference between the two ranking methods. Verma and Devi (2016) studied the web content and design trends of the Indian Institutes of Management libraries website, where they examined the information available on the library webpage of specific universities; as such a checklist was designed and library webpages were evaluated. Verma and Brahma (2017b) examined the selected library consortium websites in India by analyzing total numbers of webpages, domain authority, equity links, internal and external links and their WIF, and observed that e-ShodhSindhu and DeLCon consortiums are the most popular among the selected consortia of India. Verma and Brahma (2017c) also conducted a study on webometric analysis of selected non-profit organizations of Assam and have found that the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Guwahati and AARANYAK is at the top rank among the selected non-profit organizations websites in Assam. Verma and Brahma (2017a) further conducted a study on webometric analysis of national libraries websites in South Asia and analyse the number of web pages and link pages, calculate the WIF of national libraries websites, and rank the websites as per the WIF. The study visualized that the WIF of National Library of India was the highest followed by National Library of Sri Lanka and National Library of Bhutan among the other national library websites.

Table 1.

List of libraries of national importance

From Ministry of Culture. (n.d.). Libraries & Manuscripts. Retrieved Jun 30, 2018 from http://www.indiaculture.nic.in/libraries-manuscripts.

3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

4. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The scope of the present study is limited to six public libraries of India under the Ministry of Culture as listed in Table 1.

5. METHODOLOGY

For the present study, data were collected from the websites of six selected public libraries of India during 18-20 November 2017 by using a suitable search engine, i.e., Open Site Explorer ( www.opensiteexplorer.org), that counts the number of pages in websites and number of pages linking to the websites. Open Site Explorer makes the gathering, sorting, and exporting of link data easier than ever. It is built with speed and accessibility at the forefront and provides a tremendous amount of information about the links to any page or site. The collected data were tabulated for exploration and findings of the study.

6. DATA ANALYSIS

6.1. Domain Authority and Page Authority

Table 2 indicates general information in the websites of public libraries under the Ministry of Culture which includes domain authority and page authority. Domain authority is a measure of the power of a domain name. It predicts the root domain’s ranking potential in search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. It showed that the domain authority of The Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with 63 (24.60%) was the highest, followed by National Library with 56 (21.87%) and Rampur Raza Library at Rampur with 42 (16.40%). While a high page authority score means the page has the potential to rank well in search engine results, it predicts the page’s ranking potential in search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. The page authority of National Library with 64 (21.62%) was highest, Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with 58 (19.59%) recorded second highest, and Rampur Raza Library at Rampur had 52 (17.56%).

Table 2.

Domain authority and page authority

6.2. Internal Equity-Passing Links, External Equity-Passing Links, and Total Equity-Passing Links

Table 3 depicts the internal equity passing links, external equity-passing links, and total equity-passing links of websites of public libraries under the Ministry of Culture. The equity-passing links are the links which pass value from one page to another (from page A to page B). Internal equity-passing links are the links pointing to pages inside your website. Search engines generally consider passing ranking values. It was found that the internal equitypassing links of Delhi Public Library has the highest links with 105 (94.59%) and the other five libraries are too low, resulting in Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with six links and the rest with zero links. On the other hand, based on the external equity-passing links, the National Library with 6,662 (28.70%) was recorded to be highest, followed by Central Secretariat Library with 6,067 (26.13%) and Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with 5,857 (25.23%). External equity-passing links are the links pointing from another domain to a page on your website. Search engines generally consider passing ranking values that come from external websites. That means the total equity-passing links of National Library with 6,662 (28.56%) scores is highest, Central Secretariat Library with 6,067 (26.01%) is at second, and Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with 5,863 (25.14%) is at third. Total equity-passing links are the total amount of equity-passing links.

Table 3.

Internal equity-passing links, external equity-passing links, and total equity-passing links

Table 4.

Total internal links, total external links, and total links

6.4. Followed Linking Root Domains, Total Linking Root Domains, and Linking C Blocks

Table 5 depicts the followed linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C blocks of websites of public libraries under the Ministry of Culture. Linking root domains are the number of unique domains linking to your domain or page. Followed linking root domain is a website that links to you. Total linking root domains are the number of web pages that link to you that include the followed linking root domains. Linking C blocks refers to the part of the IP address that is different. The table clearly shows that the followed linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C blocks of National Library are recorded to be on top with 139 (58.89%), 155 (58.49%), and 136 (59.91%) respectively, which is followed by Rampur Raza Library with 39 (16.52%), 41 (15.47%), and 32 (14.09%) respectively, while third position was occupied by Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library with 27 (11.44%), 31 (11.69%), and 28 (12.33%) respectively.

Table 5.

Followed linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C blocks

Table 6.

Web impact factor

IWIF, internal web impact factor; EWIF, external web impact factor; SWIF, simple web impact factor.

7. MAJOR FINDINGS OF THE STUDY

8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The Government of India have taken the initiative, i.e., National Mission on Libraries to modernize and digitally link public libraries across the country, in which six public libraries are given administrative supervision funded by the Ministry of Culture. This paper aims at knowing the present status of websites of public libraries under the Ministry of Culture and provides information regarding those selected public libraries’ websites. Websites and the Internet are an integral part of library service across the world, and to design websites to be attractive, more interactive, and more user friendly is the duty of the web designer. The quality and visibility of these selected public library websites is improving day by day as was proved from comparison with findings of a previous study (Jhamb & Ruhela, 2017) and this present study. It visualizes improvement in the findings which is good for the website score. The previous study shows that the highest domain authority of Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library was 62 and the page authority of National Library of India was 63, whereas the present study revealed that Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library’s domain authority is 63 and National Library of India’s page authority is 64. The previous study also found that the highest total equity-passing links and total links of National Library of India were 5,985 and 6,009 respectively, while the present study revealed 6,662 and 6,687 respectively. There is a difference in the result of then and now. The previous study’s findings also viewed that the Central Secretariat Library ranks first with highest EWIF as well as SWIF of 115.8 each, whereas the present study’s findings visualize that the Central Secretariat Library has the maximum EWIF and SWIF of 121.54. There is a difference of 5.74 increase in both EWIF and SWIF from the previous study to present study. The IWIF of Sarasvati Mahal Library ranks at the top with 23.25 in the previous study, but in the present study it is found to be zero and Delhi Public Library tops with the highest IWIF of 2.23.

This study will be helpful for the web designers of the institutions to make their websites more dynamic. In the same way, readers also will be able to compare and identify the most visited library websites. The findings showed that the overall WIF of Central Secretariat Library was ranked at the top position. It also revealed that the internal equity-passing links and total internal links of four libraries (National Library, Rampur Raza Library, Central Secretariat Library, and Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library) have zero links, which is an indication of poor visibility. The IWIF of all the six libraries are not in a very good status, thus it is suggested to improve the internal links of respective library websites for its better accessibility and visibility and the library websites should be interlinked with each other to make the resources used at it is desired.