Information Outlook: On The Net: Don't Fly Solo Without a 'Net

Information Outlook, vol. 1, no. 11, November 1997, pp. 13-15.

Don't Fly Solo Without a 'Net

by Carolyn Kotlas

You're the only information professional in your organization, you're trying to do everything to run a great library or information center, and you don't have a big budget to do it with. Where can you turn for quickly accessible, high-quality, free information? If you have access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, help can be just mouse-clicks away. Here are links to some of the resources that I have used in running a small, solo, or one-professional library on a shoestring. They are good starting points, but the list is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive.

Book Selection and Acquisitions

There are resources on the Internet that can help you with collection building in several ways: verification, evaluation, and locating purchasing sources. Online public access catalogs (OPACs) and booksellers' or publishers' online catalogs can guide you to what is available and help verify citations. And if your verification source is also a bookseller, you can often also use their Web site to place your order. There are several sources for lists of library catalogs. One is WebCATS, compiled by Peter Scott and Doug Macdonald of the University of Saskatchewan Library. It lists OPACs by geographical region or type of library. For locating book publishers and bookstores, try BookWire which has extensive lists of publishers and booksellers, or the American Booksellers Association which offers access to over 4,000 independent bookstores. If you are looking for an out-of-print item, check Bowker's Books Out-Of-Print, Internet Edition; then check BookWire's list of antiquarian booksellers for hard-to-locate titles.

To help you evaluate possible purchases, there are numerous book review sites on the Web. The American Library Association's Booklist magazine's online counterpart includes reviews from recent issues. For reviews of reference books, see James Rettig's "Rettig on Reference," a service of the H.W. Wilson Company. Some booksellers, such as Amazon.com, Inc., include short reviews from the press or supplied by readers on their Web sites. For more sources of book reviews online, see "On the Net: Book Information and Reviews on the Web" by Joseph R. Kraus, Information Outlook, September 1997.

Serials

In addition to the proliferation of electronic-only serial publications, the number of print journals and magazines that are available in whole or part on the Web is also growing, enabling you to expand serials offerings to your users at no additional cost or shelf space. A good place to look for what is available online is Yahoo!'s magazine list. As part of their document delivery service, CARLweb allows free searching of the CARL Uncover database of magazine and journal citations. You can search by author, subject, or journal title. The Uncover service includes tables of contents for issues listed in the database.

Newspaper publishers are also creating online editions and some feature searchable full-text archives of back articles. Yahoo! lists links to over 2,000 regional newspapers on the Web as well as national and international papers.

Cataloging

Small libraries often rely heavily on copy cataloging. The Library of Congress online catalog can be a free source of copy cataloging records, including MARC-format records, if your library's holdings are not extremely specialized. The Library of Congress' Web site offers form-based searching, while their LOCIS telnet site uses command-based searching. LOCIS also includes a searchable LOC subject headings database which is useful for creating your own catalog records. Another online cataloging aid is Matt T. Rosenberg's listing of the Library of Congress Classification System call number ranges. In cases where you cannot find existing cataloging records for your materials in the LOC catalogs and you do not want to do your own original cataloging, you may be able to locate the material in another library's OPAC and modify it for your purposes. The Library of Congress provides a list of links to other libraries' catalogs or you can use the list at WebCATS described above.

Reference Services

Web-based reference collections are an excellent way of augmenting a small or inadequate reference collection or for answering infrequent questions. Many virtual reference desks not only link to general tools (directories, dictionaries, and ready-reference aids); but also cover more specialized areas such as business, science, and government resources. Some examples of online reference desks include Iowa State's CyberStacks, which categorizes Internet resources using the Library of Congress classification system; Indiana University Libraries' Quick Reference; and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries' Virtual Reference Desk.

When your reference service takes you beyond standard tools, there are some databases available on the Internet that you can search for free. The Department of Education's ERIC database provides citations and abstracts from educational journals and reports, and even papers presented at education conferences. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) now gives access to its MEDLINE database free of charge on the Web. While use of DIALOG databases is not free, Knight-Ridder's DIALOG Bluesheets are available on the Web at no charge along with many subject-oriented search aids that can save you time and money if you do search in DIALOG. The online version of Thomas Register of American Manufacturers allows searching by product type, brand name, or company; some of the records include links to company online catalogs, which makes the online version a richer resource than the hardcopy.

Library Supplies

Many vendors of library supplies and services have a Web presence and can be located by using any general-purpose Web searcher if you know the company's name. AcqWeb's "Guide to Automated Library Systems, Library Software, Hardware and Consulting Companies" is a good place to start if you do not have a name for a vendor.

Professional Development and People Networking

The Internet provides a wealth of information for the information professional who works alone and does not have easy access to library literature, especially in the area of information technology. Current Cites is an annotated monthly bibliography of selected articles, books, and electronic documents on information technology edited by Teri Andrews Rinne, head of Public Services at the University of California-Berkeley's Bancroft Library. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, published by the University of Houston Libraries, includes papers on digital libraries, document delivery systems, electronic publishing, and online catalogs. Several print journals of interest to information professionals also make some articles from back issues available on the Web: Computers in Libraries, Database, Information Today, Link-Up, Online, and Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals.

Keep abreast of professional news by checking the Web pages of professional organizations such as the American Library Association, American Society for Information Science, SLA, SLA Solo Librarians Division, and the Medical Library Association.

Another way to use the Internet to overcome professional isolation is to subscribe to library-related mailing lists (listservs) and Usenet newsgroups. Search Diane K. Kovacs' The Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences to locate and retrieve subscription information on listservs covering a wide range of topics of interest to information professionals. "Selected Library-Related Newsgroups" from The Indiana University-Bloomington Libraries, lists nearly three dozen newsgroups that let you take part in discussions with your peers.

A final way you can network with others is to be a part of the great feast of good--free things provided by and for information professionals on the Internet. Often it is as simple as taking existing resources you have already created or compiled and making them available in a Web page. For example, this article is based on a Web page that grew out of a personal collection of URLs (see "Online Resources for the Solo Librarian") that I thought others might find useful. If you have benefited from the work of others on the Web, consider how you can make your own contributions.

The following is a listing of the Web addresses mentioned in the column. Addresses are listed alphabetically within sections and are current as of September 8, 1997.