LC for URLs? Who should do this? Why?

[Alejandro Garza Gonzalez]

On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Boyd R. Collins wrote:

> This is a very interesting, if traditional attempt to organize Web
> resources.  The word "traditional" here is not meant in any perjorative
> sense.  In fact, it's quite compelling to see how our traditional philosophy
> of classification can be so helpful in organizing this completely different
> medium, as nascent as this current effort is.

I also took a look at it, and was intrigued... it's a bit different to 
try and broaden one's view of what one really wants to get at, say think 
of "biology" first and "microbe" later, than just pumping "microbe" into 
InfoSeek or Lycos...

[.. stuff deleted]
> type of effort really adding to these resources.  A description of the
> resources is provided, but no attempt at evaluation in the sense of a review
> is made.  It would seem that we are relying on the sound judgement of a
> trained librarian to make correct judgements concerning the value and
> utility of the sources included and in all cases I've examined this
> judgement seems present.  He has also done a good job of defining his criteria.

In my opinion, i think we could best think of Internet Resources on the 
WWW the same way we think of any other medium... my guess is that there 
could be someone in the library who could evaluate the quality of 
different sources of information, and then "add" that source to the 
library's collection; same as our acquisitions dept. figures out which 
book to buy from a variety of books with the same topic. 

The difference is, at least for now, that while the WWW is still in its 
development stages, where information can just jump from one place to 
another or completely dissapear from one day to the next, AND that a kind 
of hacker spirit is still required to fully surf and harness its power, 
the same person who decides which book to buy won't necessarily be the 
one who decides which URL to catalog... although we might be getting 
there soon.

I was thinking about just getting it over with, and start cooking up MARC
records for interesting places on the web with some use for local research. I
think it would be good for these URLs to start showing up in our OPAC and get
patrons used to them; I was also thinking of making up records for, say, an
HTML description of our Databases on CD-ROM. That way, when someone does a
subject search on, say, "biology", he could pick from books, magazines, and a
description of the Wilson Biology database on CD-ROM. If the patron wanted to
go into the database right there and then, and we had some gateway for 
that to be done, everything could be integrated nicely.  

Heh, maybe I'm just thinking out loud by now, the hour is late :)

> &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
> Boyd R. Collins, Automation Manager, The Libraries
> home page: http://www.mnsfld.edu/depts/lib/index.html

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| Ing. Alejandro Garza Gonzalez       | E-MAIL: agarza at campus.mty.itesm.mx |
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