Ref lib questions WWW in OPACs

[R124C41 at aol.com]

The cataloger at Fermilab has been putting URL's of high energy physics
preprint full texts in the 856 field for nine or ten months whenever they are
provided by the author on the paper copy received.  This was six or seven
months before the library got the DRA web server module (which just occurred
in August).

But once that occurred, the previous months of work by our cataloger were
immediately operationally "clickable" and useful to our patrons.  It is
great!  It is a great compliment to designing systems around standards and
designing them to work together.

Sure, you can worry about the long term presence of the text at the
particular URL.  It might disappear.  But the paper copies of preprints also
disappear.  I am not sure which one's would take the prize for being the most
fleeting.  

And in any case it is a great service to the patrons.  It speeds up their
ability grab the latest and it increases the relevance of the catalog to
supporting their research which in this era of having to prove every day your
relevance to the overall research program is a very important accomplishment.

So, in answer to the Genny Engel's (gen at dla.ucop.edu)
question as to whether or not one should display URL's even if not clickable,
my answer is most assuredly one should...most people in my area work with
their browser open in one corner of the screen, their telnet session to the
OPAC in another, and even if the URL in your OPAC is not clickable, it is
still valuable to be able to copy it from the OPAC to the browser and get the
document up ASAP.

And in response to the whole thread of "cataloging the internet", in a sense
the Fermilab library is cataloging the internet but, as I said in an earlier
note, selection is the key these days, and the library is selecting a very
specific, targeted part, of high relevance to its researcher patrons.

--David Ritchie
--Naperville, IL USA
--R124C41 at AOL.COM