Jean-François Vincent talks about a truly respectable but rarely useful kind of do-it-yourself activity for a growing number of libraries, documentation centers and research institutes, in offering pages of links on their Internet site.
Link pages come in all shapes and sizes, short and long, good and bad, general and specialised, and with very different aims [1]. These include giving basic help to the local user (especially in libraries with public access to the Internet), or to specialised institutions by pointing out the resources that have direct connections with their activities. These pages of links often contain rare and exciting destinations but in most cases they are seen as an obligatory feature of an Internet site, as if a site without its links section would not be significant enough.
If Internet were not in its infancy the repetitive character of these pages would be irritating. Here we have hundreds (?) of institutions, many of which have practised co-operation for many years, notably through collective cataloguing, who waste time and money repeating the same process as everyone else. The situation reminds me of stamp collecting when it was practised in schoolyards when I was a boy; everyone wanted to have as fine a collection as his neighbour, and would peek at his neighbour's album and try to have at least the same stamps as he had. In the end, the school’s collective effort had produced a big collection of similar small collections, none of which were worth very much on the philatelic market! So it is today with pages of links, we peek at our neighbour's pages and complete our album of sites with new ones we find there.
This two-for-a-penny copying business produces almost the opposite result of what the pages’ authors intended (and they are usually aware of this): the collections obtained when not extremely specialised are desperately incomplete, because nobody can cover all the ground. So users do not waste time with them and quickly resort to the big commercial search tools. Just ask library readers - or even librarians - which search tools they use apart from Yahoo!, Altavista and other such monsters.... What then is the use of pages of links, if these big tools can answer users' needs? But academic or technical needs are not so easily satisfied. And, hidden within the forest of useless selections, small and scattered original collections are hidden from the view of the average user, who only comes across them, in the best of cases, after wasting much time, and then only by chance.
But enough irony. We are all still learning and most of these efforts, as they stand, will in all likelihood disappear. Nevertheless they will have allowed us to gain useful experience of the Internet. It was a necessary step.
Isn't it time though to stop tinkering with 'do-it-yourself' processes so that institutions who want to best serve their public can give themselves an effective means to do so? To really be of use, their selection has to grow to a critical mass that very few institutional subject gateways have attained [2]. The only way to attain this critical mass is through co-operation. Some institutions have already started this, notably in Great Britain. The aim of the Resource Discovery Network [3], launched in January 1999, is to connect quality gateways (and other Internet resources), which are themselves the result of collective projects. A number of European countries are attempting to do the same through the Renardus Project [4]. In the United States several interesting projects have already been set up, these include Infomine [5] and the Online Computer Library Centere (OCLC) has launched the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) Project [6], the IMesh group [7], [8], wants to favour international co-operation, still in its infancy. There are other ongoing initiatives which cannot all be listed here.
But if it is necessary to create a widely distributed co-operative network so that the said institutions may play a real role in discovering the resources of the Internet, it remains for the partners to start working together. Co-operation involves an energetic impulse, long discussions, and hard-won agreements. It requires years of efforts to produce really convincing results. It also requires shared knowledges.
A pioneer in Europe, the European Commission funded DESIRE programme [9] has been designing tools to aid in the cooperative creation of catalogues of Internet resources for academic and research communities. And it has recently offered us a really efficient one.
This tool is called The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook. Written in clear and simple English by the designers of gateways which are already well-known or which deserve to be, it seeks "to support libraries and other organisations interested in setting up large-scale information gateways [10] on the Internet", by reporting what has been tried so far, by giving up-to-date, well-structured information and by presenting case studies. The different aspects involved in setting up a gateway are reviewed and coherently presented, with information on planning, staff and skills requirements, management, selection policy, metadata, subject indexing and classification, and technical issues. Updated versions are announced, and one has already appeared.
You may object that initially I was talking about pages of links while DESIRE deals with large-scale gateways. Does the library of the University of ******* really have to throw away its twenty-page list, and build a large scale gateway, in spite of its staff problems, and this year's budget cuts? Of course not. What I am suggesting is that this library and ten others, working in the same academic field, or for the same public, could agree to set up a common database, to which each partner would contribute according to its capabilities; that if this were done with common sense and pragmatism, it would not cost too much; and that, at the very least, the result would be of great advantage to the user. I am also suggesting that their parent organisations should quickly decide on a co-operation strategy so that these databases may function effectively (in terms of policy, cataloguing and technical requirements) with those set up in related fields. This would mean an end to the waste of time, money and energy that the duplication of similar pages of links represents. It would, of course, cost something. You can not set up a database without at least a server and a system administrator [11]. You can't co-operate unless you spend some time talking either, but at least, the job would get done.
There are numerous ways to set up a co-operation, the details of this can be quite complex so we will not go into them here.
My first aim is to encourage those who could be interested by this subject to read the DESIRE handbook carefully, in it the different cooperative models are clearly described. I consider it to be the best introductory guide to the issues raised by the cataloguing of Internet resources. The guide contains approximately 150 pages, was written by 13 authors aided by 11 contributors from 5 institutions and 3 countries, and contains 235 further online references and numerous printed ones. It is not just another publication on the subject, but THE source you must have read before beginning to catalog Internet sites with a non-profit objective, or to improve the service once you have begun.
It demonstrates that enough expertise is now at hand for serious work to be done. Furthermore, it gives librarians an easily accessible base of common knowledge, and this would greatly facilitate discussions and allow us to avoid the usual errors of beginners and the long-term consequences of bad starts.
If one agrees that libraries are the best candidates for cataloguing some Internet resources – and this is my opinion, but one could discuss the question at great length -, then one also has to admit that the only way to do it properly is through co-operation. My second aim (as you must have guessed by now) is to relay here the invitation made throughout the handbook, let's co-operate. Let's stop working all by ourselves. Methods exist and are only waiting for us to put them to use. Tools are available and needs are not lacking. So let us incite our institutions, our parent organisations and ourselves into action. It is now possible to give up the 'do-it-yourself' process, and provide our users with the services they have a right to expect.
This article was written on Dec. 9th, 1999, and was published in the Lettre du bibliothécaire québécois n· 20, October-December 1999 [12]. It was slightly revised on May 27th, 2000. Thank to Marianne Peereboom (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague), who suggested that I publish it in English, Juliette Jestaz who agreed to translate it, and Jean-François Barbe, editor of the Lettre du bibliothécaire québécois, who gave copyright permission.
I must first specify that the opinions expressed are strictly personal.
Jean-François Vincent
Librarian
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Département de recherche bibliographique
Jean-François Vincent is the coordinator of Les Signets de la
Bibliothèque nationale de France
directory.
URL: <http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/liens/>
For citation purposes:
Jean-François Vincent, "Towards The End Of 'Do-It-Yourself' Gateways? The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook ", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/desire/>
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