<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Thursday, October 21, 2004  

Reconciling the Order of the Library with the Chaos of the Web
http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2004/pearce2.html

Noting that the library has long been "a metaphor for order and rationality," where the search for information is aided by knowledgeable librarians, Judith Pearce, director of business analysis at the National Library of Australia, contrasts such structure with the "anarchy" of the Web: "The Web is free-associating, unrestricted and disorderly. Searching is secondary to finding and the process by which things are found is unimportant. Collections are temporary and subjective where a blog entry may be as valuable to the individual as an unpublished paper as are six pages of a book made available by Amazon. The individual searches alone without expert help and, not knowing what is undiscovered, is satisfied." Services like Google and Amazon have raised the expectations of library users. For others, they have introduced a "world of information in which libraries and their collections have new audiences and new roles to play." Pearce describes recent changes at the National Library, aimed at reducing the separation between the Web site and the library catalog in order to draw users into the collection. Visitors to the new color-coded site do not even need to know what a catalog is in order to find information, she says.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:20 AM
archives
subject tracers™