[WEB4LIB] RE: Communication between Librarian & Webmaster?

[Hillary Theyer]

As a Librarian/Webmaster I would suggest the following to educate more
librarians about what a webmaster does:

Draw the similarity between creating web pages in HTML and cataloging a
book in MARC.  Anyone who understands the idea behind MARC tags can follow
HTML tags with no problem.  

Be sure not to get wrapped up in how a web page looks.  Librarians are
almost universally best at writing the content of a web page, organizing
it, making it useful and easy to navigate.  Any college student can make it
look fancy.  Librarians should play to their strenghts and leave fancy
design to someone else.  

Explore the possibilities of the hypertext elements of a web resource.
When I teach other librarians how to write in HTML I always use the Kelley
Blue Book and Grangers Index to Poetry as examples.  Think about how these
resources could be improved with the ability to leap from index to the
appropriate pages.  Kelley Blue Book is actually on the Internet, so after
we have discussed it we go look at how the content is the same, but the
navigation is much improved by hypertext.  As professional searchers,
librarians can follow this right away, and get excited about the ability to
improve an already reliable resource.  

That's all I can think of.  

Hillary Theyer
Palos Verdes Library District


At 08:28 AM 9/16/98 -0700, you wrote:
>I would almost bet that most webmasters for libraries are also librarians.
>If not, they should be.
>My 2/100ths of a dollar.
>
>--
>Bill Drew
>DREWWE at MORRISVILLE.EDU
>--
>
>
>