Cataloguing beyond the walls: APLA 1997 Introduction

A caveat

While the library is often thought of as a collection of books and journals by those outside of its walls, and increasingly as an interpreter of information and policy by those within, a good library is, in fact, an organic synthesis of four interconnected functions: selection, identification, interpretation and administration. While our budgets force us to move the boundaries of these functions around constantly, we should never lose sight of how important each of these is to the role the library plays within its user community. Maintaining this balance is one of the most difficult but critical roles of administration.

While libraries have grown somewhat accustomed to budgetary ebbs and flows, the strain of a major information technology transition does not usually occur within an institution's five-year or any other plan. That makes the current flowering of the Internet particularly hard to accommodate, especially during a transition time in global economic life. Institutional stress is the obvious result. This is where strategic planning or outcome modelling become important management tools. We are in one of those transition periods today with electronic information banging at our doors. That it is unlikely to go away is still a matter of conjecture, but is becoming less so with each passing day. The next couple of years are likely to be ones that test our self-image and possibly our existence. Research like that described here is important during these periods, whether it ultimately leads anywhere or not, simply because it is important for us all to learn what the issues are and to see paths clearing ahead of us to deal with them.

In which the grounds are laid...

What is the nature of the information universe that comprises the Internet today? Is there anything out there of value to our patrons? If there is, how do we sift that which is of value from that which is not? If these electronic resources are of value to our users, should we provide the same level of access to this information that we presently provide to our monographs, serials, scores, maps and A-V materials or should we provide something less? How much less? Should these materials be identified within our online catalogue or in a separate finding aid such as a Web page or an index similar to those used to provide access to periodical articles? Should we only be providing access to materials that we have paid for, or some that are free too? Perhaps more to the point in these days of budget cuts and shrinking staff, how can we find the time to select, catalogue and archive electronic resources when we can't even find the time to do the same for traditional library materials anymore? Do patrons expect the library to provide access to electronic materials or only to those things that are physically present in the building? If we don't provide access to electronic information now, will our library become nothing more than a book museum in a few years when print publications can no longer compete with the presentation capabilities and immediacy of the Internet?

These are questions being heard in more and more libraries these days as Librarians try to find a middle ground in dealing with electronic information, particularly information found on the Internet and accessible via the World Wide Web. This medium's popularity, in the few years since Mosaic first enabled graphic browsing for the masses, has been overwhelming. Every day sees hundreds of new high-quality electronic journals, texts, resource discovery tools, and multimedia presentations become available online. At the same time these are going electronic, their print counterparts are, in many cases, disappearing, victims to higher costs in preparation, distribution, and warehousing. Libraries are starting to view electronic media today in much the same way they previously viewed paper, microfilm or videocassettes. Where discussion of electronic resource issues at conferences, meetings and on library electronic lists like Web4Lib, AUTOCAT, and SERIALST once sounded tentative at best, it is now starting to sound oddly familiar to those of us who have watched the profession cope with print materials over the last twenty or thirty years. Where only three years ago we asked "what do we do with these things?", now we talk about standards (character set, markup language, graphic format, and metadata structure/attributes), preservation, archiving and copyright protection.

This presentation will not try to cover all of these areas, but will instead focus on the selection and discovery aspects of Internet resources, looking at both traditional discovery methods as well as some newer experiments and tools. In the end, it strongly supports the integrating function of the library OPAC, as both a finding tool, and increasingly, a gateway to the actual information containers themselves.