Yesterday we presented our conference feedback and I launched my “Let’s share everything!” manifesto. By the end of the session we were running late so we eschewed taking questions in favour of adjourning for lunch, but the idea’s out there and hopefully percolating. In the meantime I have LibGuides, focus groups, lesson plans, institutional repository verification, liaison, maybe-Facebook, hopefully-podcast, and oh-yes-outreach to set up before first semester starts.
But the other day I was reading (via LibraryTechNZ) a paper on IM a Librarian: Extending Virtual Reference Services through Instant Messaging and Chat Widgets. This linked to an open source tool and I navigated back up the chain to find a page the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries has set up a page of open source software projects they’ve been working on. So there’s one more precedent for the list.
And the fact that I came across it by such a chain of links has convinced me that, valuable as it is to get the stuff up onto the web anywhere, the real value will come when we can pool all of it into one place for easy findability.
“one place” – isn’t that called the Web?
š No, yes, and no.
Technically no: the web is composed of millions of interconnected nodes. Which is actually an advantage: it means that if Miskatonic University Library suddenly gets destroyed by some lovecraftian monster, then all the other nodes are still safe (at least for a little longer…) (So a global repository Really Ought to have backups and mirrors.)
In theory yes: though Google is very far from searching the whole web, it probably does search the vast majority of library websites.
In practice no: Google searches also bring back results from the bazillions of non-library sites out there, which makes it hard to create a precise search to avoid wading through junk and irrelevance.
We tell students to use library databases rather than a generic web search because of the precision and reliability problem: databases are composed of handpicked resources to save their time. We should have a similar resource ourselves.