Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 40
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| Volume 1, Number 18 | March 4, 1998 | |
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A Virtual Library with Empty Shelves |
  
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A List of Books Versus a Collection of BooksIt turns out that the main feature of the firstladies.org site is an "annotated bibliography" of information about the first ladies prepared by historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents' Wives and Their Power. A bibliography, of course, is a list of articles and books. It is not the articles and books themselves. The AP article in question mentions a "bibliographic database" but fails to apply that critical qualifier in the key paragraph. Argus Associates , based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, maintains a Clearinghouse of bibliographies covering every subject matter imaginable. Samantha Bailey, a senior consultant for Argus who appraises such bibliographies for the Clearinghouse, explains her concept of the difference between a virtual library and an online bibliography: The notable distinction between libraries and bibliographies is that libraries house substantive information, while bibliographies list sources of information. In an exaggerated sense, libraries can exist independently of bibliographies, but not the other way around. In the online environment the term "library" is used rather more loosely than in the physical world. Nonetheless, thanks to resources like the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/) and the Humanities Text Initiative (http://www.hti.umich.edu/), the online community has rightfully come to expect that an electronic or virtual library will be a rich repository of full text materials and/or links to other online resources.I think Bailey's got it right here. Any meaningful definition of "virtual library" must include online access to primary materials, not pointers to content that exists only in remote physical libraries. I asked Bailey's impression of firstladies.org in that context: In this sense, the term "virtual library" is a misnomer in describing firstladies.org, a site which is primarily a bibliography of print resources with neither full text information nor links to other online resources. Although there is a tremendous amount of information in this bibliography, it is not something that can be used independently of at least one (and probably a number of) physical libraries in the real world -- which is fine for the researcher or dedicated history buff, but less useful to a student doing an assignment for school or to the casual enthusiast.In other words, firstladies.org doesn't really provide any assistance at all for that proverbial schoolgirl doing research over the Net for her class assignment from her Internet-wired home in Tennessee. It's analogous to a physical library with a catalog of 40,000 items  but none of those items are on the shelves of that library. So what's the big deal here? So what if a few citizens misunderstand that a prominent new site doesn't really offer full text? Read on. More... |
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