= [Overview]
The job of librarians, that had already changed a lot with
computers, went on to change even more with the internet.
Electronic mail became commonplace for internal and external
communications. Librarians could subscribe to newsletters and
participate in newsgroups and discussion forums. In 1999,
librarians were running intranets for their organizations, like
Peter Raggett at the OECD Library, or they were running library
websites, like Bruno Didier at the Institute Pasteur Library.
Computers made catalogs much easier to handle, as well as
library loans and book orders. This was the case for Anissa
Rachef at the French Institute in London. Librarians could type
in bibliographic records in a computer database that was
sorting out book records by alphabetical order, with search
engines for queries by author, title, year and subject. By
networking computers, the internet gave a boost to union
catalogs for a state, a province, a department, a country or a
region, and made things simpler for interlibrary loan.
= Two experiences
# At the OECD
The OECD Library was among the first ones in Europe to set up
an extensive intranet for the staff of its organization. What
is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is
rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's
goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club.
Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's
commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The
core of original members has expanded from Europe and North
America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland,
Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And
there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through
programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia,
Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to
membership." (excerpt from its website in 1999)
The OECD Central Library serves the OECD staff to support their
research work, with more than 60,000 monographs and 2,500
periodicals in early 1999, as well as microfilms and CD-ROMs,
and subscripions to databases like Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and
UnCover.
Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central
Library, first worked in government libraries in United Kingdom
before joining the OECD in 1994. An avid internet user since
1996, Peter wrote in August 1999: "At the OECD Library we have
collected together several hundred websites and have put links
to them on the OECD intranet. They are sorted by subject and
each site has a short annotation giving some information about
it. The researcher can then see if it is possible that the site
contains the desired information. This is adding value to the
site references and in this way the Central Library has built
up a virtual reference desk on the OECD network. As well as the
annotated links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of
references to articles, monographs and websites relevant to
several projects currently being researched at the OECD,
network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new
acquisitions. The Library catalogue will soon be available for
searching on the intranet. The reference staff at the OECD
Library uses the internet for a good deal of their work. Often
an academic working paper will be on the web and will be
available for full-text downloading. We are currently
investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our
periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the
internet."
What about finding information on the internet? "The internet
has provided researchers with a vast database of information.
The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never
has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries
to find information on a topic by searching the internet. When
one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory
like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very
difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. These search
mechanisms work well if one is searching for something very
precise, such as information on a person who has an unusual
name, but they produce a confusing number of references if one
is searching for a topic which can be quite broad. Try and
search the web for Russia AND transport to find statistics on
the use of trains, planes and buses in Russia. The first
references you will find are freight-forwarding firms who have
business connections with Russia."
How about the future? "The internet is impinging on many
peoples' lives, and information managers are the best people to
help researchers around the labyrinth. The internet is just in
its infancy and we are all going to be witnesses to its growth
and refinement. (...) Information managers have a large role to
play in searching and arranging the information on the
internet. I expect that there will be an expansion in internet
use for education and research. This means that libraries will
have to create virtual libraries where students can follow a
course offered by an institution at the other side of the
world. Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a
virtual librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but
instead will contact me by email, telephone or fax, and I will
do the research and send them the results electronically."
# At the Pasteur Institute
"The Pasteur Institutes are exceptional observatories for
studying infectious and parasite-borne diseases. They are
wedded to the solving of practical public health problems, and
hence carry out research programmes which are highly original
because of the complementary nature of the investigations
carried out: clinical research, epidemiological surveys and
basic research work. Just a few examples from the long list of
major topics of the Institutes are: malaria, tuberculosis,
AIDS, yellow fever, dengue and poliomyelitis." (excerpt from
the website in 1999)
Bruno Didier, librarian and webmaster of the library website,
explained in August 1999: "The main aim of the Pasteur
Institute Library website is to serve the Institute itself and
its associated bodies. It supports applications that have
became essential in such a big organization: bibliographic
databases, cataloging, ordering of documents and of course
access to online periodicals (presently more than 100). It is a
window for our different departments, at the Institute but also
elsewhere in France and abroad. It plays a big part in
documentation exchanges with the institutes in the worldwide
Pasteur network. I am trying to make it an interlink adapted to
our needs for exploration and use of the internet. The website
has existed in its present form since 1996 and its audience is
steadily increasing. (...) I build and maintain the webpages
and monitor them regularly. I am also responsible for training
users. The web is an excellent place for training and it is
included in most ongoing discussion about that."
How about the future? "Our relationship with both the
information and the users is what changes. We are increasingly
becoming mediators, and perhaps to a lesser extent 'curators'.
My present activity is typical of this new situation: I am
working to provide quick access to information and to create
effective means of communication, but I also train people to
use these new tools. (...) I think the future of our job is
tied to cooperation and use of common resources. It is
certainly an old project, but it is really the first time we
have had the means to set it up."
= Online catalogs
# OPACs
The internet boosted library catalogs through cyberspace. OPACs
(OPAC: Online Public Access Catalog) were more attractive and
user-friendly than the older print and computer catalogs. Some
catalogs began to give instant online access to the full text
of books and journals, something that would become a major
trend ten years later.
The first step was UNIMARC, as a common bibliographic format
for library catalogs. The IFLA (International Federation of
Library Associations) published the first edition of "UNIMARC:
Universal MARC Format" in 1977, followed by a second edition in
1980 and a "UNIMARC Handbook" in 1983.
UNIMARC (Universal Machine Readable Cataloging) was set up as a
solution to the 20 existing national MARC (Machine Readable
Cataloging) formats. 20 formats meant lack of compatibility and
extensive editing when bibliographic records were exchanged.
With UNIMARC, catalogers would be able to process records
created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC format would
first be converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted into
another MARC format. UNIMARC would also be promoted as a format
on its own.
In May 1997, the British Library launched OPAC 97 to provide
free online access to the catalogs of its main collections in
London and Boston Spa. It also launched Blaise, an online
bibliographic information service (with a small fee), and
Inside, a catalog of articles from 20,000 journals and 16,000
conferences. As explained on the website at the time: "The
Library's services are based on its outstanding collections,
developed over 250 years, of over one hundred and fifty million
items representing every age of written civilisation, every
written language and every aspect of human thought. At present
individual collections have their own separate catalogues,
often built up around specific subject areas. Many of the
Library's plans for its collections, and for meeting its users'
needs, require the development of a single catalogue database.
This is being pursued in the Library's Corporate Bibliographic
Programme which seeks to address this issue." The "single
catalogue database" was fully operational a few years later.
Another leading effort was the one of the Library of Congress
with its Experimental Search System (ESS). The ESS was "one of
the Library of Congress' first efforts to make selected
cataloging and digital library resources available over the
World Wide Web by means of a single, point-and-click interface.
The interface consists of several search query pages (Basic,
Advanced, Number, and a Browse screen) and several search
results pages (an item list of brief displays and an item full
display), together with brief help files which link directly
from significant words on those pages. By exploiting the
powerful synergies of hyperlinking and a relevancy-ranked
search engine (InQuery from Sovereign Hill Software), we hope
the ESS will provide a new and more intuitive way of searching
the traditional OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog)." (excerpt
from the website in 1998)
Another interesting - and totally different - initiative was
the creation of the Internet Public Library (IPL) by the School
of Information and Library Studies at the University of
Michigan. The IPL went live in March 1995 as the first U.S.
digital public library to serve the internet community, and to
catalog websites and webpages. The librarians' task was to
choose the best documents available on the web, and process
them as library documents for them to be easily accessed from
the IPL website, that acted as a portal. The IPL sections were:
Reference, Exhibits, Magazines and Serials, Newspapers, Online
Texts, and Web Searching. There were also Teen and Youth
sections. All items were carefully selected, catalogued and
described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library, IPL
also listed the best internet projects that were run by
librarians, in the section Especially for Librarians. Since
then, students from the IPL Consortium, a consortium of
colleges and universities with programs in information science,
have worked on maintaining and developing the IPL as a public
library for the web.
# Union catalogs
In 1999, the two main union catalogs were WorldCat, run by OCLC
(Online Computer Library Center), and RLIN (Research Library
Information Network), run by the Research Libraries Group
(RLG).
What exactly is a union catalog? The idea behind a union
catalog is to earn time by avoiding the cataloging of the same
document by many catalogers worldwide. When catalogers of a
member library catalog a new document, they first search the
union catalog. If the record is available, they import it into
their own library catalog and add the local data. If the record
is not available, they create it in their own library catalog
and export it into the union catalog. The new record is
immediately available to all catalogers of member libraries.
Depending on their status, experience and quality of
cataloging, member libraries can either import records only, or
import and export records.
OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) was created in 1971 as a
non-profit organization dedicated to furthering access to the
world's information while reducing information costs. The OCLC
Online Union Catalog - renamed WorldCat much later - began as
the union catalog of the university libraries in the State of
Ohio. Over the years, OCLC became a national and then worldwide
library cooperative, and WorldCat the largest library catalog
in the world. In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records in
400 languages - with transliteration for non-Roman languages) -
and an annual increase of 2 million records. In 1998, 27,000
libraries in 65 countries were using OCLC services (paid
subscription) to manage their collections and provide online
reference services.
WorldCat has only accepted one bibliographic record per
document, unlike RLIN (Research Library Information Network),
launched by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in 1980. RLIN
accepted several records per document, with 88 million records
in early 1998.
Members of RLG were mainly research and specialized libraries.
RLIN was later renamed the RLG Union Catalog. Its free web
version, RedLightGreen, was launched in fall 2003 as a beta
version, and in spring 2004 as a full version. This was a
major move, not only for library members, but for all internet
users, who could also access it for free.
In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400
languages, from 9,000 member libraries in 112 countries. In
2006, 73 million bibliographic records were linking to one
billion documents available in these libraries.
In August 2006, WorldCat began to migrate to the web through
the beta version of its new website worldcat.org. Member
libraries now provided free access to their catalogs and
electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full-
text articles, photos, music CDs and videos. RedLightGreen
ended its service in November 2006, and RLG joined OCLC.