Page 251 - DLIS007_LIBRARY AUTOMATION

Library Automation

Notes Libraries and their catalogues can also be accessed via the Internet. The most recent Online
Public Access Catalogues (OPAC) Directory, published in 1998, which is a guide to catalogues on
the Internet, contains 1434 entries worldwide, but 888 are from the United States and most of the
remainder from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Western Europe. Developing countries
and Eastern European countries have few or no entries. The information in the guide was
collected in the spring of 1996, and since then the number of libraries with Internet-accessible
OPACs has grown considerably in Western Europe and Canada.

Example: Denmark had 11 entries in the 1998 guide, all of them university libraries. At
the end of that year, there were more than 125 libraries with OPACs in Denmark, and among
them, 75 public libraries.
The Internet has made new activities possible. Electronic conferences or informal discussion
groups can be arranged with limited or open access, and surfing on the net has become the
equivalent of zapping on the television or browsing through the shelves in the library.
The Internet uses sensitive and vulnerable techniques, so there are many possibilities for
malfunctioning to occur. This is particularly threatening for institutions serving a great number
of users or involved in large and expensive programmes, such as mass digitization, but can also
have catastrophic consequences in small institutions. The traffic on the Internet and the number
of Web sites are growing exponentially and this leads to problems with queuing and unacceptable
answering times.
For the library and archive professions, there are other aspects of the World Wide Web which
give rise to problems. The central issue with all electronic documents is that of authenticity. Is
there any certainty on the Internet that the document has in fact been produced by the author/
organization that claims to have done so? Is the text today the same as it was yesterday and will
it be so tomorrow? A thesis using references to electronic documents, without printing them
out, runs the risk that they may be changed at a later date or even cancelled. These problems are
being dealt with by specialists who are developing standards for electronic documents.
The second problem is that of searching in large quantities of data, because a search based on one
or a few keywords easily leads to several thousand addresses. The search can be refined by using
the tools developed for this purpose, such as Boolean operators, language or geographical
limitations, provenance, etc. Problems will remain, however, because the Internet is, from this
point of view, completely anarchic. Large parts of it are unedited and there are no general rules
about the use of vocabulary. Searching in the areas of education and research may result in a
large number of opinion papers with no academic quality control whatsoever. Published material
in print and other media have usually been through an academic, professional and economic
selection process, but this is not true of individual home-made ‘information’ products. Much
development work needs to be carried out by the information profession to address the concept
of selectivity. This, however, raises the problem of censorship versus confusion and uselessness.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
9. The …………………… uses sensitive and vulnerable techniques, so there are many
possibilities for malfunctioning to occur.
10. The …………………… can be regarded as a huge reference base, with all types of
information available, either as metadata or full text, sound and images.
11. The use of computers is …………………… working processes in libraries and archives.
12. Electronic …………………… groups can be arranged with limited or open access.

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