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environment is an increased pluralism in available information resources, a parallel
diversity of facilities for selecting from these information riches is essential.
The tools and methods of selection and evaluation must become more diverse and
flexible. Today, virtually all evaluative information is intended for direct human
consumption; a person reads a review or rating service and then perhaps makes a
decision to acquire a product or use a service. It seems clear that in order to manage
the overwhelming and dynamic flood of information that will occur in the networked
environment we will need to develop software tools to help us in selecting information
resources and navigating among them. Encoding and knowledge representation for
evaluative information, and in fact even the definition of appropriate data on which to
base selection decisions are areas in which research and innovation are desperately
needed, along with all of the accompanying issues of algorithm design for software to
assist in such decision making ; indeed, the lack of progress in this area may prove to
be a significant limiting factor achieving the promise of a large scale networked
information environment.
14. Directories and Catalogs of Networked Information Resources
As networked information resources multiply, one of the central issues will be locating
appropriate resources to meet various needs for information [Lynch & Preston, 1992].
There are many tools that have evolved for identifying various types of information
resources for various purposes, and many organizations that produce these tools for
many reasons.
Libraries have played a role in this area through their collections (and the choices they
have made in selecting and acquiring these collections), their catalogs, and the
bibliographies and directories that they make available to their patrons. However, in the
electronic environment, the role and content of these tools for locating and identifying
information are changing. One important and problematic issue is the relationship
between library catalogs and networked information resources. In the print world, one
can distinguish the cafalog, which describes and provides access to material held by a
given library from the bibliography, which defines and provides access to the literature
on a given subject without regard to where that literature is held (and typically does not
provide the user of the bibliography with any information that would help this user in
physically obtaining access to material listed in the bibliography) [Buckland, 1988] .88
88 Basically for economic reasons, the coverage of library catalogs is typically limited. Since the early part
of the century, libraries have typically been unable to afford to catalog the individual articles in journals that
they receive, so they only catalog at the journal level. Bibliographies (or abstracting and indexing
databases, which are simply the electronic successors to printed bibliographies) are used to obtain access
to journals at the article level; library catalogs are then used to determine if the library holds the journal
containing the desired articles. So-called online library catalogs today typically at large research libraries
offer access not only to the library's catalog, but also to some abstracting and indexing databases
(bibliographies); a few systems offer the ability to view the bibliography as a form of catalog by permitting
users to limit searches to articles in journals held by the library. This is accomplished by having the
library's online information system link the library's catalog database to the journal titles covered by the
abstracting and indexing database. A few systems, such as the University of California's MELVYL system,
or OCLC's EPIC/FirstSearch service have gone a step further and also linked the journal holdings of other
universities to these bibliographies, thus in some sense transforming the bibliography into a union catalog
of holdings in a specific discipline (though not a comprehensive one, since there are undoubtedly journals78
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United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment. Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections, report, August 1993; [Washington D.C.]. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc39703/m1/84/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.