Yahoo - What librarians CAN do

[Ernest Perez]

Wilfred Drew wrote:
> 
> I am opposed to librarians trying to catalog the Internet.  We should be
> concentrating on developing the subject guides as suggested by Eric
> Rumsey.  Several years ago after I wrote Not Just Cows I issued a
> challenge on PACS-L suggesting that each librarian and/or library pick a
> subject and create a highly selective guide to online resources.  My
> challenge was pretty much ignored.  Not Just Cows is such a guide.  It
> is highly selective and does tend to reflect my likes and dislikes.  Why
> can't each one of us select a narrow or broad subject and create a
> selective yet comprehensive guide to internet/online resources?  We used
> top write such things about the print literature. They are called
> bibliographies.

I agree with Wilfred about the folly of trying to catalog the Internet.
This is really a classic Herculean task, and for sure not suited to
non-funded do-gooder volunteers. 

Who's gonna RUN such a project, fund the system, provide for editing,
quality control, marketing, tech support, etc.? I mean, NSF projects are
grant-funded, not volunteer affairs. And all of us who are
non-profit/public funded, how to rationalize taking time & effort away
from your organizational mission and target audience?

I agree that librarians have great skills in building information access
systems. But it seems to me that this work is best aimed at individuals
and local/specialized audiences, who are finite and manageable targets.
I also think that librarians are CONSUMERS and intermediaries for
consumers of intellectual products. We don't print or produce the corpus
literature; we use it. Same for big finding tools. We don't produce
Britannica, Engineering Index, Books in Print, Science Citation Index,
we're expert in USING them.

Fantasizing about national voluntary projects to catalog "cyberspace" is
kind of unreal. This kind of an effort takes labor and time and cashflow
and capital money! We're not in a 1940s Andy Hardy movie. ("I have an
idea! Let's put on a show!")

It would be nice if someone got a wondrous Daddy Warbucks grant to do
something like this. If someone succeeds in this, let me know; I'd
probably be interested in hiring on. But I'm sure the qualified
librarian/info science types who do work for operations like IAC, Wilson
Indexes, Dialog, etc., would not choose to be there if those were
strictly volunteer operations.

Cheers,
-ernest
Ernest Perez, Ph.D./Oregon State
Library/perez at opac.state.or.us/503-378-4243
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