The Public Library as a Gateway to the Internet

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The Public Library as a Gateway to the Internet

• Developing an effective filter for your user,
  without the heavy maintenance

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Introduction

• 1 The Internet and information overload
• 2 How best to guide your users to high quality
  information without creating a burden you cant
  cope with
• 3 Help at hand - authoritative national
  initiatives exist, to help you avoid
  duplication
• 4 The RDN example

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Needles and Haystacks

• Proliferation of web publishing
• Estimated 1 billion indexable pages on the web
  (NEC Research Institute and Inktomi, February
  2000)
• Percentage of full text indexed by each search
  engine
• Google 56
• WebTop.com 50
• Inktomi 50
• Alta Vista 35
• FAST 34
• Northern Light 27
• Excite 25
• Go (Infoseek) 5 (2)

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Lifes too short
The search healthy eating at AltaVista reveals
more than 50,000 hits. The novice searcher
demands the best and fast.
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The Automated Indexer

• Search Engines - vital for the Internet searcher
  and increasingly sophisticated
• However judgements in terms of - prioritisatio
  n of results
• - depth of indexing
• - relevancy
• are strictly limited and users are continually
  overwhelmed
• Artificial intelligence, is currently unable to
  address this

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Sorting the wheat from the ...

• Tried and tested ways to help
• Guiding users to the sites they need
• Educating the user about search techniques and
  useful sources
• Providing links to portal and gateway resources
  (to avoid duplication locally)

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Future stickiness

• Tips and Tricks
• Find the authoritative source and the
  comprehensive source and link to these
• When describing links, dont duplicate, do what
  you do best (provide the niche)
• Introduce guidelines, standards and collections
  policies to ensure consistency and high quality
• Ensure links are easy to manage and maintain -
  use a database

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Local Gateways

• Librarians and Web Masters have made some
  excellent in-roads in providing useful gateways
  to the Internet - but they are difficult to
  maintain and develop on a library by library
  basis unless they are carefully planned
• For clear comprehensive guidance in setting up
  an Internet gateway visit www.desire.org/handbook

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What else is out there?

• The great news is that there are many existing
  services which already provide resources to
  complement your own service
• The RDN example
• A free, subject based service your users can can
  access now.
• The RDN provides users with effective access to
  20,000 high quality Internet resources selected,
  evaluated and described by specialists for
  learning, teaching, research and professional
  development.

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Why a national service?

• The story of why big can be best
• The RDN has developed partnerships with key
  national organisations to help
• Avoid duplication
• Maximise potential for strategic partnerships and
  commercial arrangements
• Develop cost effectively into (related) new
  subject areas

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The eLib Legacy

• The evolution of the subject gateways began five
  years ago
• eLib programme ANR (Access to Networked
  Resources)
• eLib subject gateways (1995) projects funded to
  address the challenges of resource discovery in
  the emerging network environment
• A touch of EEVL
• A hint of OMNI (science)
• A piece of SOSIG

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Building the Foundations

• Developing standards
• Technical infrastructure
• Creating managed collections of resources
• Search interfaces and navigability
• Enhancing access and discovery
• Creating rich resource descriptions
• Facilitating BrowsinggtHierarchical Browsinggt
  Searchinggt

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Commonalities

• No requirement to conform-however...
• Similarities in data content emerged
• Same software and architecture (ROADS) adopted by
  the majority of gateways
• Similarities in cataloguing guidelines - each
  influenced more general ROADS guidelines

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Birth of the RDN

• A federated structure
• Networked organisation
• Faculty based hubs
• Centre promoting, sustaining, developing,
  supporting
• ensuring quality, consistency,
  interoperability and cost efficiency
• - exploiting intrinsic interdisciplinary and
  cross-sectoral value
• - business planning to sustain the network

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Organisational overview
The Centre provides coordination, administration
and strategic direction for the hubs
HUMBUL
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Building Partnerships

• Collaboration on both a national and
• international scale is key to achieving the RDNs
  
• objectives
• National Grid for Learning The Peoples Network
  BBC Online British Library University for
  Industry LTSN Subject Centres GLTC British
  Council
• International partnerships e.g. Renardus IMesh
• Avoiding duplication, developing best
• practise, facilitating joined-up growth

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Current Developments

• Helping the library community meet the demands
  of increasingly sophisticated and demanding
  users
• Enhancing interoperability and sharing approach
  to development
• Developing collections and subject coverage
• Enhancing services to enable local customisation
  - RDN-include grapevine my-account RDN-news
• Working with the community to ensure the services
  we provide are complementary

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RDN-include
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Subject based web tutorials
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Virtual Training Suite
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RDN Subject Portals

• RDN is central to the Distributed National
  Electronic Resource (DNER) and will
• Articulate a subject approach to network
  resources, providing subject portals geared to
  user interests, fusing and aggregating relevant
  content
• A series of rich entry points, enabling seamless
  access to a range of diverse resources
• Develop protocols, frameworks, commons standards

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What can you do?

• Join our mailing list to hear more
• Promote the RDN and the VTS service to users and
  colleagues
• Work with us - add your links
• Pilot RDN-i within your site
• Tell us how to develop to meet your needs and
  those of your users

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Help us to carry on mapping the WWWilderness
www.rdn.ac.uk
Justine Kitchen info_at_rdn.ac.uk