Web Presence of Repositories of Indian Institutes of Technology: A Webometric Study

Abstract

Links weave web documents together in a complex, structured hypertext corpus. Web links studies have been conducted by the scholars and information professionals all over the world since its introduction. The main objective of the study is to investigate the web presence of repositories of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) as a part of the World Wide Web. To investigate the web presence the few sub-objectives have been framed such as to identify IITs which are having their repositories; to find out the TLD, cc TLD and file formats use by the repositories; to find out total number of Web Pages, Link Web Pages, Self Link Web Pages, External Link Web Pages and Inlink Web Pages; to calculate Overall Web Impact Factor, Simple Web Impact Factor, Self Link Web Impact Factor, External Link Web Impact Factor and Inlink Web Impact Factor. Google covers more hyperlinks with advanced search facilities to count links possessed by the websites. Therefore, the present study has used Google to collect raw data, i.e., number of web pages, number of inlinks, self links and external links etc. Boolean operators are also used to form query syntaxes for retrieving data. SocSciBot web crawler is also employed. It is used to create network map of all the websites. URLs/websites of repositories are tested through command line textual queries like link, linkdomain, site, etc. Findings have been derived after analyzing the data.