Organizing Web information

[DEANNE LUCK]

Here's an idea:  What if a central office was set up with maybe 2 or 
3 people to which web page authors vould submit their pages.  
This office would keep a database of librarians from all over the
country or the world, and the URL for the homepage would be automatically
sent to an appropriate librarian knowledgeable about that subject (I suppose
the page authors would decide on their own broad subject area).  The
librarians could be those that already particiapte in OCLC or other bib
utiliies.  The librarians would assign subject terms as metadata, and send
that back to the author, who would then attach it to his or her page.
I've not studied up on metadata schemes, but I assume these terms could
be searched with an altavista type search engine.

If libraries (and librarians) looked at this as they do OCLC, as a way to
contribute and so lessen the workload of us all, I think there would be
enough participating librarians that on one would be overwhelmed.  It would
require people to submit their pages, but people do that now (for Yahoo, etc).
There wouldn't be an actual "catalog" so it wouldn't be out of date.  If
an author substantially changes a page, s/he could submit it again to have
the subject terms updated. 

I see the central office as being sponsored/funded by LC and other national
libraries, making it a world-wide library initiative.  (Why not dream big,
since I'm taking the time to type this out?)  It would take a lot of 
cooperation and contribution in order to work, but isn't that the nature
of the Internet?

Comments?  I know there would be a lot of problems to be worked out, but
how's the theory?

DeAnne Luck
Electronic Resources Librarian
Austin Peay State University
LuckDL at apsu01.apsu.edu