Bobst Library

The New Paradigm
Discovering Networked Information with BobCatPlus

Christopher Lowden

In late 1995, Bobst Library began adding Internet resources to BobCat, the library's online catalog. BobCatPlus, the new web search interface to BobCat, contains a growing collection of networked resources such as electronic texts and journals, government documents, online reference tools and organizational home pages. This "digital library" is part of a larger project at NYU Libraries, funded over the past three years by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which seeks to develop a fully integrated multimedia information system, with BobCatPlus as the delivery tool.

Librarian subject specialists have evaluated resources and selected for cataloguing only those that they believe will prove most useful to the NYU community for study, teaching and research. The selection process is very similar to the one used for choosing books and other materials for the collection. Subject specialists ask themselves:

• Is the resource archived?
• Is it created and maintained here at NYU?
• Who is the creator or publisher?
• How stable is the site likely to be?
• Is the site well-organized and easy to use?
• Are the contents likely to be of value to researchers?
• Are the contents of a scholarly nature?

A Primer on Library Catalogs

In theory, the bibliographic record can function in the same way for all kinds of information carriers, from books to websites. At left is the full description of the Labyrinth, a website for medieval studies maintained by Georgetown University's Department of English, as it appears in BobCatPlus. A quick review shows that the record contains the elements discussed above, plus some additional information.

Starting at the top, the phrase "computer file" in the Title field indicates that the resource is in machine-readable form. The Publisher field helps identify the person or organization who provides the resource. The "system requirements" and "mode of access" in the Notes field identify the access method and any special hardware or software needed to use the resource. The Summary field provides a description taken from within the site itself; this can be especially useful for judging the site's relevance to a given query.

The Subject headings assigned are the same ones used to provide subject access to materials in the library's own collection; thus a subject search on "Middle Ages" will group the Labyrinth site together with all other materials on this topic. The Electronic Access field provides a URL that indicates the item's location on the Web, in much the same way that a traditional call number leads to the appropriate physical location of a book or journal. Users of BobCatPlus can connect directly to the site with a click of the mouse.

Currently there are more than 650 Internet sites catalogued and available through BobCatPlus. Librarians are monitoring the sites they select and reporting bad or missing links for updating, an inevitable situation given the volatility of the Internet. There is little empirical data available on the stability of Internet resources. A 1996 study by a private consulting firm on approximately 1,000 websites found that only ten percent of the "root" server addresses changed over an eight month period. That figure would probably compare very favorably with the "hit rate" for availability of books and other items in most circulating libraries' collections.

BobCatPlus has the potential to serve as a gateway to many kinds of digital information, including resources produced and mounted locally. For example, the catalog record for a book or journal could link to a table of contents scanned into electronic form. With archival collections, catalog users could move from a broad description of the entire collection to an electronic finding aid, and from there could search for individual pieces of that collection -- manuscripts, photographs, etc. -- that had been converted into digital form. Working with this model, the Special Collections department at Bobst is currently scanning materials from the Tamiment/Wagner, Fales, and University Archives collections, and is creating electronic finding aids using SGML, or Standard Generalized Markup Language, to enable users to navigate within these "virtual" collections. Finally, the catalog might link to other locally produced and mounted resources, including multimedia and image databases.

NYU's efforts are taking place within the global framework of an evolving "digital library". On a national level, there are several initiatives under way in the library and information communities to develop new models for accessing and using metadata (literally, "data about data"). One such initiative, known as the Dublin Core, is envisioned as a standard set of descriptive elements that the creators of networked information resources would supply along with the resource itself. Search engines could then use Dublin Core records to enable much more effective searching and retrieval than is currently possible over the Internet. Other initiatives are underway in the computer science communities to define unique identifiers for digital objects, much like the current ISBN system for books. A search engine could conceivably use this "Uniform Resource Identifier" to find the location of a digital object, no matter where it resides on the network.

Much more work needs to be done before these initiatives are implemented on a national or international level. However, many see the selection and cataloging of Internet resources as the first step in the eventual transformation of the library catalog from a record of local holdings into a gateway to all kinds of networked information. In the meantime, BobCatPlus is enabling researchers to quickly identify, evaluate and access Internet resources.

Posted January 20, 1998