lib4web

[Toni Alatalo]

On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, James Cayz wrote:

Hello again.  

To answer your question: fi-domains are given only to registered Finnish
companies and other organizations.  Since no "Library of Finland"  exists
is also the domain lib.fi (or "kirjasto.fi") not available. This might,
however, change when the nation-wide services are better understood, but
that's not the issue here.

> 	If we have / get *.lib, how would we go about sub-dividing it?
> Certainly, there would be some name duplication, and probably use
> locality to help resolve the problem, so, we would be back to where we

How do you think the .store, .arts, .nom and other new will be divided?
Just look at .com! 

Locality on the net is often not about the geographical residence but the
identity on whole -- about the service you provide and your role in the
process.  I believe that at least some of the library services should be
named primarily after the core substance of the service itself, even
though the physical location will often remain important.  

People need services that won't be restricted by the walls of a single
library, city, county, country or continent.  On the internet counts what
you provide, not where you do it. Hopefully people believe that joint
ventures produce better results. 

There are some promising examples already: the fairy-tale database in
Tampere which whole Finland uses and the Kurdish library in Sweden. 
<URL:http://www.marebalticum.se/kurd/index.htm> Also the Finnish virtual
librarian is designed so, that the work can be distributed through out the
nation. 

I believe that the main point in .lib would be reserving a place for
services that count for wider areas than a single traditional library
does.  They are rare now but coming.  The domain could be, for example,
divided in different special areas, like:  comics.lib, geography.lib etc. 
The central locations (www.lib) could also include lists and maps of
different libraries on the area.

Language is one of the most difficult problems in internationalization and
other de-localization.  In HTML it is more or less solved and we'll see
the pages get far better multilingualized soon, but other parts of the net
and web are a bit more problematic (besides the "grocery.store" we'd also
need "ruoka.kauppa" and a couple of hundred other good names in other
languages).

Thank you for your comments.

-
Toni Alatalo, civil servant             http://www.lib.hel.fi/~antont/		
Helsinki City Library / Cable Book      http://kirjakaapeli.lib.hel.fi/