Was:Anatomy of a netscam/ Organizing Web Information

[skindrf1 at teomail.jhuapl.edu]

I think that Jim Campbell, Laura Cohen and our old friend, Tom, from the
Buzzards Nest are getting to the point of what we as librarians or information
specialists are supposed to be doing with these Internet resources and that is
attempting to organize them for our users.  In our particular case we are doing
so for a relatively small audience, a university sci/tech laboratory (see http:/
/lib2.jhuapl.edu/APL/ins/ins.html) while others might have to do for an entire
university, a state, a republic or whatever.

I usually try to think of our project, the Information Navigation System or the
INS as an extension of our library.  In such a scenario the search engines are
sort of like the opac or the indexes or even the cd-roms, the finding tools,
but you also need the hard copy stuff, the books and the journals so we have
both.  When someone uses our system they can use the search engines, most of
them are in one place and even grouped as to general, by subject or by
organization, but we also supply them with links to places where strong subject
resources and locations are already supplied that we have looked at and
periodically try to check to make sure that they are current.

I'm glad that this netscam business has come up but now I'd like to see us show
one another what we or our organization have done with these new internet
resources and how we are making them useful to our peopleor organizations.  I
guess what I am looking for is a way to unify the work that we are all doing;
for example, I grabbed Jim's Western European work and pointed to it from my
political science section; when SILS introduced their physics, chemistry and
astronomy reference pages I pointed to them from their respective subject
pages.  I guess that what I would like to see here on this list is more showing
off of what we've each done with the full understanding that the other list
members might very well add it to their resources.  At least we will be
librarians or whatever we call ourselves helping each other with the
understanding that some real work/research has gone into what we are displaying
---and whatever you do, don't take any money to put someones resource at the
top.

C'mon, lets talk about it.

Bob Skinder
R.E. Gibson Library and Information Center 
The Johns Hopkins University 
Applied Physics Laboratory
410-792-6000 ext. 4685
robert_skinder at jhuapl.edu
http://lib2.jhuapl.edu/APL/ins/ins.html