Collection Issues and Overview

Abstract:

The knowledge and information available today on the Internet which is relevant and valuable in our academic institutions is important, often unique, and exploding in terms of numbers of total available resources. Finding these resources, developing poli cies to identify and record them, developing procedures to share the workload, and staying current in an area of subject specialization represent some of the major challenges to today's academic librarian. Our panelists describe their experiences in these and related areas.

Welcome

You will hear about the finding tools and procedures used by these collectors and you will hear about the problems and solutions that they have encountered. They will be taking a very practical and hands-on approach to explain how they keep up with the developing resources in their areas.

I want to take just a few minutes to highlight some of the general issues surrounding this topic. Many of my comments will be in the form of questions, mostly because libraries engaging the Internet as a productive information environment find themselves coping with very dynamic situations in an environment that can best be characterized by the words "momentum" and "growth". That is, rapid change has become a major constant and there aren't a lot of clear answers at this point. I hope that my remarks w ill stimulate your thinking as you listen to the other panelists.

I want to thank the co-author of this segment, who was actually the coordinator of the entire session, Steve Mitchell, whose work has brought us a lot closer to understanding the role of libraries and librarians in the world of Internet resources.

The Internet has changed the concept of "place" in relation to both collections and collectors. In the electronic world, it has become less important WHERE a document resides and more important to have reliable, well organized (and presented) access to it. We want to know who produced it, who identified it as valuable, and who selected it for our use, but that person does not have to sit at the desk next to us. We no longer need to "own" a physical manifestation of the information in our private institutional domain, but we must provide the appropriate technological and organizational infrastructure to access it reliably.

Most Internet resources are still available at no cost. Increasingly, though, sites are requiring a fee, license, access agreements, or user or workstation registration. How many of these myriad resources add value to the virtual world of information? How many are specifically relevant to you and your work? Selection of resources relevant to our academic institutions has become a time-consuming task. We don't (yet) have in place the equivalent of a book jobber or serials vendor who understands our profile and sends us relevant URLs. We are doing this ourselves.

Is this a vital new role for librarians as the profession struggles to distinguish itself in the new environment? Are we uniquely positioned as the interpreters and selectors, the annotators, indexers, and adders of value to electronic resources in much the same way as we have done with print resources? How can we do this in the most effective way while doing all the other things that librarians do? Are there some models out there?

I'd like to take a moment to describe one. It is {INFOMINE} (http://infomine.ucr.edu/). INFOMINE (Mitchell and Mooney, 1996) is a library web resource which was begun in January of 1994 at the University of California, Riverside. Created by librarians Steve Mitchell and Margaret Mooney with support from faculty, students, and staff, INFOMINE is the UCR Library's unique tool for accessing Internet information resources. It is divided into separate subject/disciplinary areas and includes access to close to 5,000 selected sites featuring scholarly and educational material. INFOMINE is unique for many reasons: (1) because of the level of annotations and standardized indexing it currently provides, (2) because of the sophisticated search techniques it offers, (3) because of the hypertext database management system it employs, (4) because of its ease of use in adding new resources, and (5) because of its high relevance in meeting the research and instructional needs of its users.

INFOMINE is more than a traditional library web homepage or subject list. It is a value-added, enhanced, and customized hypertext virtual library of links for the university community. It is also more than a local resource. Because of its early role in organizing electronic information resources, it was "discovered" by the international Internet community, and has been recognized as one of the top sites of its type. INFOMINE averages over 24,000 accesses each week. Since last summer, INFOMINE has be come a system-wide virtual library resource, as participants from all UC campuses and Stanford are now contributing to its databases. Here is a brief description of three cooperative collecting projects going on right now:

• The UC/Stanford Internet Government Information Project (UC/SIGIP) is a collecting project for government information resources, with participants from each of the UC campuses and Stanford. Lynne Reasoner, who is on our panel, will tell you more about this.

• A maps/GIS collecting project with WAML participants from several UC and Stanford map libraries is adding resources collaboratively in this area.

• An educational outreach program for UCR and regional K-12 educators is an important new project utilizing INFOMINE as a base for collecting shared resources for Education. This project has implications for the role of the University in the community and for distance education as an innovative way to enhance networked communication. The University Librarian, with strong support from campus administration, has developed a 3-year pilot program to collaborate with schools in two California counties. Ten to twelve schools representing elementary, middle, secondary and community college levels have been identified for accelerated access to the electronic resources of the UC System. Joint projects such as this are breaking down the barriers in the educational process and promise to build a continuum of collaboration and educational success among its participants.

Collection policies and procedures must be created for local developers of virtual libraries and for cooperative virtual collection programs just as they are for physical library collections. These policies will have to address these and other issues:

a) Are we willing to pay for these resources? Who pays? The question is, "where does the responsibility for funding reside: with the individual researchers and students, or with the Library or Campus or multi-Campus consortium? With cooperative decision-making comes the requirement to utilize agreed-upon and codified collecting criteria. Additional financial resources increasingly are needed to support this. A trend towards charging for full access to formerly free search engines, navigators a nd other basic Internet resources is apparent and will continue to grow. How do public institutions react to this development?

We are, in a way, on the "cusp" today between the Industrial Age and the Information Age, between the Millennia, between the physical, paper, locally-owned library of stored information and the virtual, decentralized, cooperatively-funded electronic info rmation center. Does this mean that libraries may have to maintain redundant collections, or parallel systems, if you will, for sometime into the future?

b) Which is the better format(s): CD, web, other online forms or print? This debate will not end with today's conference, nor with tomorrow's acquisitions budget. The answer will eventually follow the lines of whichever are the most appropriate and flexible format(s) to meet the user's needs AND their needs are changing fast. User preferences and styles of researching now exist for which we do not yet have, in most cases, in-depth data. Relatedly, what is the Library's role in publicizing alternative formats and helping to create or shape new user needs in information access and usage?

The momentum and growth in numbers of serious Internet resources is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities which we, as information organizers and providers, face. How will we respond? Will we be able to make informed decisions? Will we be able to adjust our organizational infrastructure to move quickly in order to cope with the constantly changing information environment? Who are the information professionals who will make these decisions -- the academic computing specialists, the bibliographers, the reference librarians? What mechanisms will we be able to put in place to make relevant, expedient, and cooperative decisions as "place" becomes less important. Right now many of us feel a little bit overwhelmed. We have an idea of how much new information is out there, but we don't know to whom to entrust the monitoring, selecting and publicizing, nor the teaching of that resource base. We don't know what we should do by ourselves or what we should be doing together.

Fortunately, our panelists include some of the most seasoned UC Internet resource collectors and providers. Among them are represented some 30 years of practical Internet resource collection and organizing skills. All have been busily involved in grappling with and, in many cases, developing answers to many of the questions posed.

It's time to meet our participants, who will begin in these next few minutes to bridge the gap for us. They are:

Charlene Baldwin, Moderator:
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 1970. M.A., University of Chicago, 1973. Assistant University Librarian for the Sciences, University of California, Riverside since 1994. Active member of SLA. Interests include international librarianship and the development and appropriate use of computer technology in libraries.

Garrett H. Bowles:
A.B., UC, Davis, 1960. M.A. San Jose State University, 1962. M.L.S. UC, Berkeley, 1965. Ph.D. Stanford University, 1978. Worked at Stanford University, 1965-79; Music Librarian, UC, San Diego, since 1979. Active member of the Music Library Association, Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and International Association of Music Libraries. Garrett is known for advocating computer technology in music libraries. Among his many activities in that vein, he chaired the joint Music Library Association - Library of Congress committee which developed the MARC format for music.
Presentation/Discussion: "Untangling Music".

Richard Chabran:
Richard is Librarian In Charge, Chicano Studies Research Library, UCLA. He is a co-founder of the Chicano Periodical Index, the Chicano Database, and Chicano/Latinonet. He recently co-edited the Latino Encyclopedia, a six volume set published by Marshall Cavendish.
Presentation/Discussion: "Further Tangling the Web: Cultural Diversity on the Web" (with Salinas).

Steve Mitchell:
B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977. M.L.I.S., University of California, Berkeley, 1986. Science Reference Librarian, University of California, Riverside, 1986-present. Co-coordinator of INFOMINE. SLA member.
Presentation/Discussion: "General Internet Finding Tools: A Review...".

Lynne Reasoner:
B.A., University of Redlands, 1974. M.L.S. University of California, Berkeley, 1977. Lynne is a government publications librarian at the University of California, Riverside. Over the past two years she has constructed the Government Information INFOMINE, which indexes and provides links to U.S. federal government and California state government Internet servers.
Presentation/Discussion: "United States and California State Government Internet Resources".

Carlos Rodriguez:
B.S., University of California, Riverside, 1990. M.L.I.S. from UCLA in 1995. UCR Science Reference Librarian since 1995. Member of ASIS, ACM, LITA, REFORMA, and ALA. Developer of UCR's Electronic Library Information Kiosk. Member of the INFOMINE development team and serves as the facilitator of the Physical Sciences INFOMINE database.
Presentation/Discussion: "Physics, Astronomy and Math Resources on the Internet" (with Yeungling).

Romelia Salinas:
B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara, Law & Society/Chicano Studies, 1992. MLS, UCLA, 1994. Manager of CLNet (Chicano/LatinoNet) at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Library, a web and gopher site dealing with Latino issues. Moderator of a listserv on Latina women issues.
Presentation/Discussion: "Further Tangling the Web: Cultural Diversity on the Web" (with Chabran).

Lucia Snowhill:
B.A., Occidental College, 1971. M.S.L.S., University of Southern California, 1973. Worked at Dallas Public Library, Xavier College (Cincinnati), Ventura Public Library System, and has been at UC Santa Barbara since 1978. Lucia is Social Sciences Collection Coordinator and collection manager for Political Science, Law, and government documents. She has been active in GODORT, LAUC, and now ACRL, with a special interest in federal information policy.
Presentation/Discussion: "Netting Political Science: Finding Resources on the Web".

Fred Yeungling:
M.L.I.S., University of California, Berkeley, 1986. University of California, Santa Cruz Science Reference Librarian since 1988. UCSC Physical Sciences and Mathematics Bibliographer since 1992. Member of SLA, CARL, and SEAL. INFOMINE participant in math and astronomy.
Presentation/Discussion: "Physics, Astronomy and Math Resources on the Internet" (with Rodriguez).

References

Mitchell, S. and Mooney, M. 1996 (in press). "INFOMINE: A Model Web-Based Academic Virtual Library." Information Technology and Libraries. 15 (1). [{http://library.ucr.edu/pubs/italmine.html}] (link available when print issue is out, 5/15)