Organizing Web Information (was: Something Missing) -Reply

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

And to respond with a little Trotsky to a previous Stein (I think it's
Trotsky...): what is to be done?  A fascinating WEB4LIB discussion!

I don't see any way to avoid indexing documents.  Five minutes with Alta
Vista makes that obvious.  I do think I see something similar to Netfirst,
but publicly-accessible, and distributed.  As in, a cataloging project that
pointed to records consolidated in various electronic consortia.  And
maybe records that could be exported to MARC and GILS, but weren't
necessarily MARC in origin--and with several levels of cataloging, so
normal folk could contribute records which could be enhanced by
llibrarians.   Any thoughts here?  

This does bring up Z39.50.  In theory, if all these documents were on
Z39.50-compliant servers, we could use Z39.50 to present universal and
local interfaces for searching these records.  In reality, Z39.50, as
interesting as it is, hasn't been catching on, and probably can't be leaned
on for this kind of project... or could it?  It is tantalzing to imagine a
project where we say, you keep the records wherever you wnat and on
whatever server you want, and we'll rely on Z39.50 as our Esperanto.

GILS has been another underachiever, but one of the good contributions
from GILS has been a GILS record entry form which we are here
tinkering with.  Our still-evolving plan tentatively involves having have
folks fill out a short version and write a brief abstract; when warranted,
librarians (AKA far-from-normal detail freaks with special training) will
polish up and finish the cataloging.   The form we are plagiarizing from is
at:

 http://skydive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/toolbox/gils/demo/form.htm  

However, we're just using this as a launch pad--the initial form, that
normal humans will see, will be MUCH shorter.  (And there is no reason
that a form like this is exclusive to GILS; it's just that in the course of
being Good Compliant Folks we found this and decided to use it.)

Anyway, I sense great things burbling up from the fertile waters of
collaborative librarianship... 

Karen G. Schneider
Director, US EPA Region 2 Library
opinions mine alone