Ref lib questions WWW in OPACs

[Genevieve Engel]

>> This would make it
>> possible to imbed URLs in the records in the 856 field, allowing users to 
>> access Internet resources directly from the displayed record.
>
>Absolutely.  This will, of course, be the case.

In fact, people are already putting URLs in the 856 (as well as, in some
cases, in 538s and in locally defined holdings information ... go figure)
although for many records they're putting in parsed-out URL information
across several different subfields.  The URL subfield is not required; its
definition says "856 is structured to create a URL from separate subfields."
So we may well be called upon to provide clickable URLs whether they exist
in the record or not, by stringing different combinations of subfields
together in some order that we hope will build a valid URL.  I have my
doubts as to whether this is going to generate valid URLs reliably.

One question that has been brought up around my office is whether URLs
should even be displayed by an ASCII-text-based OPAC, since it could mislead
users into believing they can click on it.  Do you find that users do have
such expectations based on their experience with the web?

There are several web-to-Z gateways operating now, at least one of which I
know has clickable URLs in the display.  Some gateway URLs from my bookmark
file (most or all of these have already been posted to WEB4LIB):

http://zweb.cl.msu.edu

http://library.ncsu.edu/drabin/alcuin

http://library.utoronto.ca:8002

http://lindy.stanford.edu/~harold/z3950/www_gateway.html

http://liba.lut.ac.uk/main.html

Genny Engel
gen at dla.ucop.edu