[WEB4LIB] Organizing links pages

[Karen Harker]

We briefly flirted with the idea of having all our links in a database and using a ColdFusion application to retrieve the links and a brief description.  We got little enthusiasm for it, so we set in on the back burner.  

However, I do know that some sites are entirely controlled by a database.  I think we may still go back to the database idea when we get into allowing personalization of the home page.  

Karen R. Harker
UT Southwestern Medical Library
Dallas, TX


>>> <toth-waddell at ontla.ola.org> 2/12/99 11:25:09 AM >>>
This is a problem which I'm sure many libraries are beginning to encounter.
We have developed a links page (containing over 700 sites) for our staff and
clients which contains links to web sites of research value.  Some of these
links appear under the jurisdiction responsible, eg. Canada - federal;
Canada - provincial; others appear under broad topics and others yet under
form, eg. Almanacs.  As you can imagine, in some cases links appear under
more than one category/topic.

Do you know of any better methods to organize these links which are
proliferating outside of our OPAC?  Is it possible to create metadata
records for these links, put them in a database and then still product an
html page which is easily browsable?  

We would appreciate any suggestions on how to tackle this problem.  Thanks

Annemarie Toth-Waddell
Information Access Manager
Ontario Legislative Library

Toth-Waddell at ontla.ola.org 
(416) 314-8515
Fax: (416) 314-8541