Beyond the Internet dilemas -- how to organize and inform the public about print materials? How much "grey literature" are we going to find cataloged in libraries that are on-line with automated public access catalogs? Are they Z39.50 compliant? Are they link to / involved in regional on-line catalog consortia? Are they listed with the kinds of subject headings that our consumers will use when doing inter-library loan searches?
These issues are perhaps larger than this forum can address, but the kind of consortium-building that could potentially emerge from this discussion may have enduring impact on how our On-Line Public Catalogs develop.
In all of these organizational considerations we seem to keep coming back to issues of language -- what are the search words / subject headings that make environmental information valuable? Who is our audience? As a career-long public librarian it is the average American -- and very often a child -- to whom I must be able to get the appropriate information to. It is to the do-er of a homework assignment, not the specialist, that needs easy access to sometimes difficult concepts.
Date
|