News Items for _Journal of Internet Cataloging_

[Robert H. Terry]

Hi,

Our Software/WWW SBIG is available for public consumption without User 
Authentication at: http://rbse.mountain.net/cs/ .   It has approximately 
100 Collections and two types of searching mechanisms.  Feel free to open 
it up and drop a comment on you way if you are so moved.

Bob Terry


On Mon, 4 Nov 1996, Jon Knight wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Nov 1996, Tom Tipsword wrote:
> > When you think about how much time we spend seriously (!) discussing 
> > things like cataloging the Internet, it's no wonder that librarians have the sort 
> > of image that leads to stuff like the Packard Bell commercial which has been the 
> > cause of so much wailing and gnashing of teeth lately.   Seriously, have you 
> > ever heard anyone who wasn't a librarian demand that catalogers come in 
> > and straighten out this messy Internet thing?
> 
> Yes I have; me.  I'm a computer scientist, not a librarian and I'm not
> alone.  Manual cataloguing of Internet resource has a number of features
> that make it a useful adjunct to the "vacuum cleaner" robot generated
> indexes such as Lycos and Alta Vista.  For one thing human's bring with
> them the ability to make value judgements of quality and the ability to
> assess the semantics of resources that machines currently find _very_
> difficult to do (its still hard for humans).  An manually generated
> catalogue of resources is never going to be as comprehensive as the robot
> generated indexes but then they don't have to be; many people just want to
> find the quality resources associated with their field of interest.
> 
> To this end the UK Electronic Libraries programme has funded a number of
> Access to Network Resources (ANR) projects specialising in Subject Based
> Information Gateways (SBIGs).  The SBIGs make use of manual record entry
> and resource quality assessment in order to shift "the wheat from the
> chaff".  There are currently a number of operational SBIGs including ones
> for social sciences (SOSIG - <URL:http://www.sosig.ac.uk>), medicine (OMNI
> - <URL:http://www.omni.ac.uk> and art and design (ADAM -
> <URL:http://www.adam.ac.uk>.  See <URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/> for
> more details of the Elib program and the other ANR projects.
> 
> The Internet is a wild and wacky place and there is room for a number of
> different techniques for introducing some order into the proceedings to
> help people find information.  And finding information is what librarians
> are all about.
> 
> Tatty bye,
> 
> Jim'll
> 
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
> Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
> * I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
> 
>