[WEB4LIB] Re: Booklend??

[JENNIFER A. HEISE]

> I feel certain its the former, and that's its a poor
> promotion issue. 


Depends on the topic area. Recently this idea was floated on a historic
re-creation discussion group. There were several reasons why people were
interested:

a- it would provide a sort of indexing and selection, since a lot of the
materials that historic re-creators are interested are poorly indexed by
our current Library cataloging systems. Worldcat is all very well, but
all LC's minimal cataloging tells you is that there's a book on Korean
art, not whether or not that book has any illustrations of textiles or
costuming. We do the best we can by putting up booklists and
bibliographies on the web, but not enough people are doing this, and the
web itself is poorly indexed.

b- for the independent scholar, ILL of much academic stuff is a
difficult and troublesome business, and very seldom timely. I can get
ILL'd to me something in 7 days that an independent researcher's public
library request would take 3-6 months to get filled, and possibly not
get filled at all, or at a large cost.

-- Jenne Heise