Cataloging Utilities for maintainers

[Tony Barry]

At 9:56 PM 10/10/95, Adlington,Janice;Library; wrote:
>        Uh, remember about 18 months back, when every Web search seemed
>to turn up something from a public library in New Zealand?  Let's _think_
>about this one...

The debate about whether we should put the network in the OPAC or the OPAC
into the network ran for a while on go4lib and also eurogopher back about
three years ago.  I think the consensus was that most people didn't want
real  documents being swamped by document surrogates.

The mechanism proposed has a serious drawback in that there would be an
entry for EVERY instance of a book for each library that held it.  To do
otherwise requires a global union catalogue which we don't have.

On the other hand we have z39.50 being deployed which holds out the
prospect of virtual union catalogues and also indexing robots like harvest
where you can tailor what goes into the index.

In the end however we are left with the problem that the totality of
information on the web can be treated like a single system but the totality
of library catalogues cannot.  It is much simpler to have a single index to
the former than the latter.  From this viewpoint, electronic publications
on the web have far better controlled access than printed material.

Tony

__________________________________________________________________________
Tony Barry                  URL:http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/People/TonyB.html
Centre for Networked Information and Publishing & also
Centre for Networked Access to Scholarly Information  fone  +61 6 249 4632
Australian National University Library                phax  +61 6 279 8120
Canberra  A.C.T. 0200, AUSTRALIA                      tony at info.anu.edu.au