A trip to SIBL

[Karen G. Schneider]

After a whirlwind afternoon trip to the exhibit halls at National Online in
NYC, I felt compelled to add an addendum to my previous post.  When I say
that Internet databases are not quite ready for prime time, I am thinking
of what I would expect: full-text + graphic document delivery through a
citation database (search, read, link, display).  If citation databases
make you happy, you have some good choices.  SilverPlatter, OCLC, Ovid and
a few other vendors are delivering WWW-accessible citation databases, and
UMI offers its proprietary client, ProQuest Direct.

For many of us running out of drive mappings, or whose CD-ROM
administrators are beginning to look pre-aneurism, or who need to offer
remote access to a single resource, Internet-accessible commercial
databases offer intriguing alternatives to what we now have.  I am
predicting we will have less trouble with access to these resources, even
where special configuration is required (e.g., FirstSearch's cgi gateway,
SilverPlatter's ERL software), than with third-party issues related to what
vendors consider a "site" to be (my region covers two states and two
territories).

My only caveat is something that (to echo a current PACS-L thread) the kids
in San Francisco would probably agree with: however slick the technology,
links to citation databases are still first-generation Internet tools.  In
some ways these resources are just archie for the Bergdorf-Goodman crowd.
(Remember archie, the tool to help you find files and their ftp sites?)
While efforts are afoot to offer full-text, and some resources now qualify
as such, overwhelmingly these resources are information about documents
which are then retrieved via manual channels in sundry versions of their
nondigital selves... space shuttles yoked to surreys.

Mind you, I'm not complaining.  (Much.)  I'm impressed with the kinds of
resources we can select from.  With the particular set of resources we need
where I work, we could, if we chose to, replace every *commercial* resource
with one that is WWW-accessible or (in the case of a MARC tapeload for our
BASIS-plus-based online catalog) could be.  I could smugly comment that
some of us were called wackos when we predicted this sort of thing several
years ago.  But what I envisioned still hasn't happened on the scale I
anticipate: the movement toward real electronic publishing.  On the other
hand, this gives us something to look forward to... vive la revolucion!

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Karen G. Schneider * kgs at bluehighways.com * http://www.bluehighways.com/
Cybrarian * Columnist, American Libraries
Author, The Internet Access Cookbook (e-mail Neal-Schuman at icm.com)
These opinions strictly mine and those of Blue Highways