Role of librarians

[Paul Neff, Internet Librarian]

>>electronic world, but also more labile, and must be maintained.  Stay
>>tuned for Uniform Resource Names, coming to a server near you soon.

>Feels like waiting for Godot :-(

>"soon"?

>Hope so.

This underscores an important point.  Criticism of efforts to catalog Internet
resources or otherwise provide access to them by adapting existing tools of 
librarianship (in this discussion, anyway) have tended to take one of two forms:

1. This current tools we have to work with (our OPACs, cataloging practices, 
   sound librarianship) are inappropriate or inadequate to the task.

Essentially this is Carlos' challenge: does the Internet represent a new
paradigm for libraries?  (I won't address that now because it'll take too long, 
sorry everyone ;-)  

2. Better ways of making the Internet more orderly (URNs, URIs, indexing
   schemes somehow more relevant to Internet resources than the ones now at 
   hand) will eventually come along (or, someone else will do it), so why 
   waste the effort?

Because our patrons are demanding that we do something NOW.  Because I think 
a paradigm that can create access points to books, serials, phonorecords, 
photographs, personal correspondence, advertising circulars, paintings, teddy 
bears and dinosaur bones can manage to fit in Web pages and gophers as well.
Because there are a lot of tools at hand.  Because libraries have tackled 
bigger problems together and succeeded (I think OCLC can speak to that).
I'd like to wait for all sorts of things to happen, but I don't think the
taxpayers are going to let me.  Clearly there is not a consensus as to whether 
this is a waste of time, but I'd argue that it's better to adapt as we go than 
to put our trust in wonderful schemes not yet implemented.

Paul Neff
Internet Librarian, Kansas City Public Library
paul at kcpl.lib.mo.us