On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:59:10 -0500, Mitchell, Michael
<Michael.Mitchell_at_BRAZOSPORT.EDU> wrote:
>We use "Choice" and similar publications for suggestions of quality Web
sites to include in our catalog. I have no trouble with the limited number
of resulting catalog entries since our catalog is not a Web search engine
and I don't think our students expect it to be. I've added 5-600 Web sites
in the past year or so. These sites are good resources that happen to be on
the Web (and free).
But what do students expect to find in the catalog? The local books plus a
small number of websites, and they still must use Google anyway? I am not
finding any fault with this--it is happening in every library, including my
own--but it results in making unclear the difference between the "Web search
engine" and the library catalog. For example, there are wonderful tools such
as Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/ and Infomine http://infomine.ucr.edu/,
and they should not be ignored, plus there are lots of specialist sites. But
how do you use these sites?
As a specific example, let's say that the selector decides that all of the
resources selected for the "Humanities" section in Intute should be added to
your catalog. I don't know how many there are, but there are a *lot* and for
some libraries, it could easily be a significant proportion of the yearly
catalog production.
Every one of the sites in Intute has been selected by a librarian and/or
expert. Does it make sense to recatalog all of these resources one-by-one
and then have to go through the hassle of maintaining all of the records
whenever something changes? And remember, Intute is only one project and
there are many, many more, and while there is metadata, they do not do
MARC21/AACR2/LCSH/LCC.
Actually, a site such as Intute provides real quality selection and can be
pretty well trusted, while a more difficult site to work with would be, e.g.
the Internet Archive, which has scads of wonderful resources, but does not
have nearly the quality of "selection".
The old methods and workflows aim at creating new records in the local
database (although when you are lucky you might find usuable copy), and this
makes a certain amount of sense when dealing with unchanging physical
resources located within the local library, but these same methods result in
endless, and essentially useless duplication when used for the so-called
"remote accessed electronic resources".
And of course, this includes the duplication of selection.
As a selector, I would not want to burden my cataloging department by
cataloging materials that are already in Infomine and Intute, plus it could
take a very long time to get them done. Is there a better and more efficient
way?
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu<mailto:j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu>
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Wed Jun 30 2010 - 06:13:19 EDT