A summary of the main trawls carried out by WebWatch is given below.
The first trawl took place on 15 October 1997. The trawl covered UK Public Library Web Sites. This trawl made use of the first version of the WebWatch robot software. A report of the trawl was published in the LA Record [5]. For further information see <URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/webwatch/articles/la-record-dec1997/ >.
The second trawl took place on 24 October 1997. The trawl covered UK University Entry Points. This trawl also made use of the first version of the WebWatch robot software. A report of the trawl was published in the Web version of Ariadne, issue 12 [6].
A report on the use of the robot exclusion protocol was also produced based on this trawl in the Web version of Ariadne, issue 15 [7].
The second trawl took place in November 1997. The trawl covered eLib Project Web Sites. This trawl also made use of the first version of the WebWatch robot software. A report of the trawl was published on the UKOLN Web site [8].
During the analysis of the results obtained during the first two trawls it became obvious that the Harvest robot software had limitations in its use as an auditing robot. For example, since Harvest was originally developed for indexing purposes, it did not retrieve binary resources, such as images. Also it did not store the MIME type of the resources it encountered. Both of these limitations made it difficult to extend the range of analyses which WebWatch intended to carry out.
After the date of the second trawl, the WebWatch project began to develop its own robot, which overcame these limitations.
The third major trawl took place in May 1998. The trawl covered UK Academic Library Web Sites. A report of the trawl was published on the UKOLN Web site [9].
The fourth major trawl took place in July 1998. The trawl covered UK University Entry Points. A report of the trawl, together with a comparison of the first trawl of UK University entry points will published in the Journal of Documentation [10].
The fifth major trawl took place in December 1998. The trawl covered UK University entry points. A report of the trawl, together with a comparison of the first and second trawls of UK University entry points was published on the UKOLN Web site [11].
In addition to these major trawls, a number of additional smaller trawls were carried out, including:
Analysis of University of Wolverhampton: A trawl was carried out of the University of Wolverhampton Web site. The trawl was carried out in February 1998. Unfortunately due to software problems the trawl was incomplete and a report was not produced.
Analysis of Napier University: A trawl was carried out of the Napier University Web site. The trawl was carried out in February 1998. A report on the trawl was made available to Napier University.
Link analysis for De Montfort University: A trawl was carried out of the De Montfort University Web site and the hyperlinks within the Web site were analysed. The trawl was carried out in July 1998. The aim of the analysis was to investigate the possibility of using WebWatch as a tool for institutions to analyse links from their Web site, especially to US resources.
Analysis of University entry points in the south west: A trawl was carried out of University entry points in the south west of England (including Bath, Bristol, UWE) in September 1998. A report was given at a meeting of South West Web Managers.