Catalogs or subject guides?

[William Oldfield]

In the very early days librarians made lists of the books in
their collections.  As the collection grew it became difficult to
maintain these lists and create all the special subject lists
required.  The results was the invention of the card catalogue,
records with a variety of access points arranged in various
sequences.  Librarians selected books of value, created records
and added them to their catalogue.

Already the number and variety of lists to categorise Internet
resources is getting out of hand.  Most Web based Electronic
Libraries are now lists of resources under various categories.
Maintenance of these lists when a URL, which appears on a dozen
lists, changes is already a nightmare.  It is almost time to do
what we did in the past.  Create records for these valuable
resources with a variety of access points.  Now that most
catalogues are automated and records can have a variety of access
points we can let our users determine their own categories.

Call it "cataloguing the Internet" or "cataloguing valuable
electronic resources" I still think it is the eventual answer.
We also don't need expensive catalogue records.  Meta data stored
in the header (CIP) of electronic resources using an abbreviated
record format which can be extracted and added to our catalogues
should make this an economical process.


William Oldfield
Networked Information Research Associate
University of Waterloo Library
http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/~wroldfie/home.html
(519) 888-4567 Ext 2461


>Wilfred Drew (Call me "Bill") said:
>
>> I am opposed to librarians trying to catalog the Internet.  We
>> should be concentrating on developing the subject guides
>
> Unlike Bill, I do not think we are in an "either/or" situation,
>that is, either we catalog Internet resources or we develop
>subject-oriented guides or bibliographies.
>
> I have and I continue to encourage libraries to identify,
>select, and catalog Internet resources.  Much is to be gained by
this
>approach.
>
> --Erik
>
> Erik Jul
> jul at oclc.org
>
>
>
>