1999: LIBRARIANS GET DIGITAL
= [Overview]
The job of librarians, that had already changed a lot with computers, went on to change even more with the internet. Electronic mail became commonplace for internal and external communications. Librarians could subscribe to newsletters and participate in newsgroups and discussion forums. In 1999, librarians were running intranets for their organizations, like Peter Raggett at the OECD Library, or they were running library websites, like Bruno Didier at the Institute Pasteur Library. Computers made catalogs much easier to handle, as well as library loans and book orders. This was the case for Anissa Rachef at the French Institute in London. Librarians could type in bibliographic records in a computer database that was sorting out book records by alphabetical order, with search engines for queries by author, title, year and subject. By networking computers, the internet gave a boost to union catalogs for a state, a province, a department, a country or a region, and made things simpler for interlibrary loan.
= Two experiences
# At the OECD
The OECD Library was among the first ones in Europe to set up an extensive intranet for the staff of its organization. What is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The core of original members has expanded from Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to membership." (excerpt from its website in 1999)
The OECD Central Library serves the OECD staff to support their research work, with more than 60,000 monographs and 2,500 periodicals in early 1999, as well as microfilms and CD-ROMs, and subscripions to databases like Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and UnCover.
Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library, first worked in government libraries in United Kingdom before joining the OECD in 1994. An avid internet user since 1996, Peter wrote in August 1999: "At the OECD Library we have collected together several hundred websites and have put links to them on the OECD intranet. They are sorted by subject and each site has a short annotation giving some information about it. The researcher can then see if it is possible that the site contains the desired information. This is adding value to the site references and in this way the Central Library has built up a virtual reference desk on the OECD network. As well as the annotated links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and websites relevant to several projects currently being researched at the OECD, network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new acquisitions. The Library catalogue will soon be available for searching on the intranet. The reference staff at the OECD Library uses the internet for a good deal of their work. Often an academic working paper will be on the web and will be available for full-text downloading. We are currently investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the internet."
What about finding information on the internet? "The internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the internet. When one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. These search mechanisms work well if one is searching for something very precise, such as information on a person who has an unusual name, but they produce a confusing number of references if one is searching for a topic which can be quite broad. Try and search the web for Russia AND transport to find statistics on the use of trains, planes and buses in Russia. The first references you will find are freight-forwarding firms who have business connections with Russia."
How about the future? "The internet is impinging on many peoples' lives, and information managers are the best people to help researchers around the labyrinth. The internet is just in its infancy and we are all going to be witnesses to its growth and refinement. (…) Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on the internet. I expect that there will be an expansion in internet use for education and research. This means that libraries will have to create virtual libraries where students can follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the world. Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a virtual librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will contact me by email, telephone or fax, and I will do the research and send them the results electronically."