 |
 Quick insight into information-investment
issues for presidents, CAOs, and other
campus leaders from the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR)
Number 6, February 2002
The Issue for Presidents and CAOs:
Can Academic Users Find Scholarly Resources
Online? |
A study at UCLA of college freshmen nationally reports that
four out of five click on the Internet when looking for resources
for homework. That worries educators who question the merit
of a lot of Web-accessible information. The problem, however,
may lie less in what students find than in what they don't.
Conventional search engines fail to turn up all the online
catalogs and digital collections that universities make available
for use by students and scholars both. Many scholarly resources
elude simple key-word searches or have formats that pose computer
processing or presentation problems.
Search limits concern administrators because resource visibility
is the key to return on their institutions' investments in
digital collections and Web-access technology. What can be
done to reveal more readily, for academic users at institutions
large and small, the "hidden Web" of digitized collections,
library catalogs, and other research resources? And what can
be done to facilitate use of such electronically aggregated
information to create new resources for scholarly inquiry and
effective teaching? |
Possibilities Under Development:
Reaching Deeper With Specialized Services |
In search of answers, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is financing
seven experimental projects. Some will develop tools for electronically
collecting, indexing, and presenting information from catalog
records and other digital data; and some will create portal
or gateway services that can search many collections for information
relevant to the particular interests of enquiring scholars,
teachers, and students.
For example, ten institutions in the Southeastern Library
Network (SOLINET)Auburn, Emory, Vanderbilt, the Kentucky Virtual
Library, Louisiana State, and the universities of Florida,
Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennesseeare collaboratively
creating a portal service for research and teaching about the
history of the American South. Other projects in the Mellon
program will experiment with portals on the Cold War, political
figures, religious organizations, and topics in American studies. |
The Challenge:
Services Cannot Harvest What Schools Do Not
Provide |
Success will depend on the willingness of universities and
colleges to enable search services to draw information from
their libraries' electronic catalogs, finding aids, digital
collections, and other databases. How far the new services
reach to identify material useful to scholars and students
will be limited only by how many institutions participate.
Participation is not difficult or expensive. It requires building
a server that can mediate between the idiosyncrasies of individual
library databases and the requirements of specialized portal
services. Libraries unable to build such servers may provide
electronic versions of catalogs and other databases to portal
managers for use with their servers. Mellon projects are exploring
ways to enable libraries of varying capacities to participate
in portal-service development.
With encouragement from the Digital Library Federation (DLF),
several academic libraries and the Library of Congress already
are providing catalog records and other information describing
more than a million items in more than 50 collections. And
the DLF has issued a call for more participating institutions.
The importance of this for presidents and provosts lies in
recognizing the implications of portal service experimentation
for future research, teaching, and publishing. Electronic aggregations
of bibliographic data, digitized texts, and digital images
from libraries throughout the nationaggregations that can be
searched, recombined, and organized to respond to individual
needs for specific kinds of resourcesoffer opportunities for
the creation of new course materials, new learning experiences,
new kinds of publications, and new avenues of research not
feasible before, limited only by faculty creativity and administrative
encouragement. |
Additional Information:
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Academic administrators will find additional insight in the
following:
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