[WEB4LIB] Web Gateway vs Catalog

[Kristin Antelman]

As Mary Popp points out, most of us are using both the Web and catalog to serve as
gateways to information, in many cases providing redundant links.

I think there are several good reasons that Web-based presentations for databases
and electronic journals has become standard practice (whatever the institution
decides to do vis a vis 856 links and adding full or brief records to the catalog).

Users don't refer the catalog for familiar databases and electronic journals; what
they want is not to have to do a search, but a 'quick link' to a known destination.

Secondly, the Web is much more flexible and easily updated, partly because it is not
bound by MARC and standard cataloging practices.  Because of the effort involved,
most sites would never be able to achieve timely access to new electronic journals
if the only link was through the catalog.

One reason we are committed to Web-based presentations for links to electronic
resources is that we hope to integrate many different types of resources into a
unified whole at some point.  The user would search for electronic resources on a
given topic (browsing with a much simpler subject categorization than LCSH or MeSH)
and pull up links to fast changing information that would never merit a record in
the online catalog.  Those links would be maintained in the database by many
different people within the library.

Library catalogs never did tackle the job of providing access to journal literature:
we relied on paper indexes for that level of access. Now that those indexes are in
electronic format on the Web, often with links to the full text of the article, it
makes sense to provide users with the simplest path to that information.

-Kristin

"McBurney, Melissa K" wrote:

> Several staff members in my library are working on a vision project for upper
> management.  One of the sections deals with how the electronic portion of our
> library will be accessed by our users.  There are two (strong) opinions: the web
> site vs. the catalog.  The catalog will be on the web soon, but the question is
> whether we want to make users go through the catalog to find ejournals,
> databases, etc., if we want to organize our resources through the web site, or
> if we want a combination of the two.
>
> I was wondering what others have done, what the trends are, any articles that
> can be recommended, etc.
>
> Please respond to me.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Melissa McBurney
> Assistant Director of Electronic Services
> Hanford Technical Library,
> Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
> Richland, WA 99352
>
> phone: (509)372-7439
> fax: (509)372-7431
> melissa.mcburney at pnl.gov

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Kristin Antelman
Head, Systems & Networking
Arizona Health Sciences Library
The University of Arizona
1501 N. Campbell Ave.                kaa at ahsl.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85724-5079                (520) 626-1004