Yahoo - What librarians CAN do

[Karen G. Schneider]

Regarding E. Perez' comments: there are other options between trying to
pull off a free cataloging effort and waiting for a massive Daddy Warbucks
grant.  Many good projects start small and work their way up, demonstrating
their worth, competing with other, bigger projects, and so forth.  OCLC
started in 1967 in the Main Library of OSU, according to its own website;
pretty modest beginnings for a database that now holds 36 million records
(and grows by 2 million a year).  It's also true that there ARE Internet
cataloging projects afoot, and in their own ways they are all funded.  Very
few posters--maybe only one--suggested that such projects be sustained with
free labor.  

Now, if you think that every project needs to start as a deluxe Cadillac
with all the geegaws, you may not be happy with something smaller and
leaner.  But giant trees from tiny seeds do grow, and that ain't hopeless
optimism, it's hard science.  Given the right nutrients, at the right time,
growth happens.  All the pessimism and nay-saying in the world won't
prevent a tree from growing if it has what it needs to do so.

The idea of cataloging the Internet is only Herculean if you think of the
entire Internet.  It is not Herculean if you think of cataloging those
resources you want access through your OPAC today--and more tomorrow--and
more the following day.  It's not as if there aren't ANY websites
cataloged; there just aren't nearly ENOUGH.  And that's with very, very
little attention or resources directed toward Internet cataloging. 

Since the idea of cataloging the Internet has been poo-poohed, let us
examine it.  If there are 4.3 million live hosts--a figure I was given this
summer by a reliable source, wth the usual caveats; these were hosts
responding to alive & well checks in a given period--and there are
approximately 150,000 librarians in the U.S., if this were a project solely
absorbed by U.S. librarians, that would be 30 websites per librarian for
original cataloging, just to play catch-up. This does not take into account
maintaining new sites, or that some hosts have many discrete intellectual
resources on them, or the labor of copy-cataloging, if such a thing is
required of web resources, or the artificial idea of every librarian doing
original cataloging, or the labor of following moved and changed sites.  On
the other hand, it does not take into account the (undeniably small) number
of websites that have already been cataloged, or the number of websites
that may be alive but have no content or are mirror sites, or the
availability of librarian-built finding aids for identifying high-potential
resources, or the many other librarians outside the U.S. who might also
engage in this project.  Extensive number-jockeying, accounting for other
factors etc. would still not convince me that cataloging the Internet was
not doable.  The idea may be quixotic, but it is not totally out of the
realm of reality.  If you wanted to convince me that it was a bad idea for
*other* reasons, I'm listening, but viability won't work.

Finally, in terms of where the leadership for this would come from, it
would come from people who believe it can happen, and not from those who
don't; isn't that always the case? 

Closing an unusually prolix day--
______________________________________________
Karen G. Schneider |  kgs at bluehighways.com
Director, US EPA Region 2 Library  |  Contractor, GCI
Councilor-at-Large, American Library Association
The Internet Filter Assessment Project:   
 http://www.bluehighways.com/tifap/
Author, Forthcoming: A Practical Guide to Internet Filters
(Neal Schuman, 1997 ISBN 1-55570-322-4)
Information is hard work  -------------------------------------------