Another Node On the interNet
Barbara DeFelice
Dartmouth College
Kresge Physical Sciences Library
6115 Fairchild Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
barbara.defelice@dartmouth.edu
Managing Internet Resources
or
ALON (Another Librarian on the
Internet)
FROM:
Professor@university.edu
TO: Science.Librarian@university.EDU
SUBJECT:
geology map-moon’s dark side
MESSAGE: I need a geologic map of the dark side
of the moon in for my class, and I just wasted 45 minutes looking for it on the
Web! But it must be there! I need it for tomorrow’s class.
How would you
answer this question? It
exemplifies many of the challenges for librarians trying to manage
Internet resources. The amount and variety of information
on the Internet, and its ease of access with the linking features of the World
Wide Web, is a boon and a burden to librarians trying to connect the
communities they serve with the best resources, regardless of format or origin. Before the Web, researchers and librarians
used the Internet to access specialized databases. The Web broke down some of the access barriers and provided
new ways to present information to anyone with a network connection, developing
an expectation that everything is on the Web and is free. However, many scientific and technical
databases and journals remain the domain of those institutions or individuals
willing to pay. GeoRef, a fee
based index, covers the literature of extraterrestrial geology, for example.
As many
educators who have tried searching the Web for materials know, there is only a
small amount of really useful, quality information among the millions of
pages. Much of what is on the Web
that is free is not well-documented, so it is difficult to determine the author
or sponsor or date, important considerations in deciding on the authority and quality of the information. Studies vary in the details, but most
report that only a small percent of what is on the Web is searched by a search
engine at a given time. So finding
what you really want, being able to assess the quality and depth of the
resource, and not spending too much time doing this, can be a real challenge.
Librarians
are taking a variety of approaches to managing Internet resources in order to
meet the needs of their communities.
Some of these approaches build on traditional library values and some
are very new ways of dealing with information. A few examples follow.
oIndividual
subject information specialists, such as bibliographers, research librarians,
or reference librarians, identify and describe subsets of Internet materials to
present to their communities through customized research guides. These guides often combine print and
fee-based electronic and free Internet resources, and serve as portals for the
beginning, rather than the end-point in the research process.
oA common
complaint about Web resources is their fleeting nature. Even the good materials disappear or
move around with their authors, since long-term archiving and refreshing of
materials is not the main goal of most people who put their materials on the
Web. Libraries are joining forces
with funding agencies to commit the significant financial resources needed to
address this problem for some types of material. An outstanding example is the JSTOR (Journal Storage, URL: http://www.jstor.org/) project to archive scholarly
journals. Some organizations have
funded projects to digitize items of historic value that are too fragile to
handle in the original formats, or collections of material. This is one way to add high quality material to the Web. The geologic map of the dark side of
the moon produced by the USGS are currently available from USGS or in libraries
only in print form. (There are
collections of wonderful digital images from the Clementine mission, but these
are not maps with labeled features.)
Maybe this map should be considered for a digitization project.
oTeaching
students how to judge the quality and relevance of Web information should be part of an educational institution’s
critical mission to develop an information literate population. There are check-lists and guides that
every educator should share with their students as part of teaching them about
the research process. An example
is Susan E. Beck’s Evaluation Criteria at: http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html An early but still useful
overview is Alastair G. Smith’s "Testing the Surf: Criteria for
Evaluating Internet Information Resources.", on the Web at:
http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v8/n3/smit8n3.html. His checklist is at:
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/index.htm
For a
bibliography on these checklists, see:
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm
An associated
issue is teaching students about the ethics of citing their sources, including
anything they quote from the Internet.
Dartmouth College distributes Sources in print and on the Web at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/,
which includes a section on citing Internet resources.
oIn order to
bring the best information resources to their communities, libraries are
starting to integrate print, fee-based electronic resources and free Internet
resources into one search system for their communities by incorporating all
kinds of resources into their online catalogs. Tools like Project CORK from OCLC make it easier for
librarians to select and catalog content-rich, high-quality Internet
resources.
oAmong
libraries, inter-institutional cooperation to share materials for the benefit
of the communities of users is well established. For fee-based digital materials, including most published
scholarly research, this tradition has developed into library consortia which
jointly purchase expensive products that just one institution could not
afford. The publisher benefits
greatly in an increased customer base and the institution saves money.
oExciting
developments in the published, scholarly literature world include a variety of
linking projects. These results in
links from abstract and index services to full-text, links from references to
references, and links from index services to library catalogs, as a few examples. GeoRef is indexing digital materials, and
starting to provide live links through some vendors to the full-text of the
content that is so well indexed there.
oLibrarians
in the geosciences have augmented the personal connection and phone-based human
networking which we have used in the past by creating an invaluable virtual
network, GEONET-L (GEONET-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU), which is used to refer questions to each other, share
materials, and lobby information providers in areas such as pricing, copyright
and license restrictions, and product quality.
I have given
some examples of what libraries are doing to better manage Internet resources,
and to make the best information easier to find. What can information creators and managers do to improve the
situation for the seeker of information?
oOrganizations
need to make information management a higher priority, and provide the
resources needed to organize materials in ways that make sense to potential
users. Selection decisions
regarding what to digitize should be a critical part of an organization’s
information management strategy.
oIt is not
enough to produce good quality material, put it on your Web site, and hope that
someone will happen upon it. There are a few simple things anyone putting
material on the Web can do to make sure it can be found.
1. Use HTML metadata
tags for author, title and content to make searching and displaying of your
site in a search engine’s result set more effective. A brief guide to HTML meta tags is at: http://www.frontiernet.net/~gene/html/ (use pull-down menu to get to meta (meta
information)
2. Keep
material up to date, and document changes with dates. Consider archiving valuable images, and noting when you have
moved materials that others may have referenced or used in the past.
3. Make sure
it is well-documented and well-referenced
4. Get your
resource into a catalog or an index or a digital library; for the geosciences,
consider contributing it to DLESE, the developing Digital Library for Earth
System Education, as discussed by Manduca et al in this column.
5. Use a
resources on good Web design such as Lynch and Horton’s Web Style
Guide.
oA review
process for information on the Web would be particularly valuable, since
whether or not something has been reviewed is a long-standing mark of quality. Kim Kastens has an article forthcoming
in this journal for a proposed review process for the Digital Library for Earth
System Education.
So where do
you find digital geological maps of the moon? Knowing that there are often several avenues to the right
stuff, in this case I did a GeoRef search, identified the print items, and then
did as thorough a Web search as possible using my current two favorite search
engines, Google and Alta Vista, based on subject terms and knowledge of likely
organizations (USGS, NASA) to offer this map. Some educators have posted variations on images of the dark
side of the moon, sometimes with a few named features, but no real geologic map
was found. In this case the
quickest answer was to reach for the print USGS Publication series which has
the authoritative geologic maps of the moon. This only partly fulfills the request, because unless the
professor could digitize this large size map, he could not have it in
electronic form.
There are
many challenges in how to integrate digital and print resources and human and
automated search help features, so that no matter what the format and the level
of need for assistance, the information can be found.
References:
Dartmouth
College, Committee on Sources, 1998.
Sources: Their Use and Acknowledgement, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/ (7 September
1998).
Smith, Alastair
G., 1997. Testing the Surf:
Criteria for Evaluating Internet Information Resources. The Public-Access Computer Systems
Review , 8 3, pp. 5-23.
Lynch, P. J.,
and Horton, S., 1999. Web Style
Guide : Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites , Yale Univ Press, New Haven, CT.
Manduca, C.
et al, 2000. Digital Library for Earth Science
Education, Computers & Geosciences, 26 2, pp.?.
Stuart-Alexander,
D. E., 1978. Geologic map of the
central far side of the Moon, USGS Miscellaneous Investigations Series, I- 1047, (1 sheet), Reston, VA.
Shaded relief
map of the lunar far side, 1980. USGS
Miscellaneous Investigations Series, I- 1218-B, (1 sheet), Reston, VA.
Map showing relief and surface markings on the lunar far side, 1980. USGS Miscellaneous Investigations Series, I- 1218-A, (1 sheet), Reston, VA.