administering collections of internet links (fwd)

[Tony Barry]

Has anybody looked at reversing this problem?

The library maintains the structure - either a thesaurus or a
classification with an index which is maintained to reflect the interests
of the users of the library.  Each class or term has a form to capture new
links and descriptive material about them from library users.

Each link would have space for user commentary (authenticated to limit
silly comments) on links so that poor ones could be dropped based upon user
requests. As a by product this would provide a reviewing mechanism. Online
bookshops do it -amazon.com, why not libraries?

Instead of the librarians collecting links and then indexing them in some
way and having to maintain the whole structure, the librarians would do
what they are good at, organizing concepts, and the users do what they are
good at, recognizing what is useful and pertinent.

Libraries exist in the way they do because getting hold of physical books
is hard and finding out about new ones is not easy..  On the internet
getting hold of pages is easy and lists, like this, make it easy to hear
about new quality material.  The need for a model where everything is
delegated, by and large, to the librarian is lessened.

Perhaps what we should be looking at is cooperative link management systems
rather than an imitation of library cataloguing.

Tony

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