The Catalog as Portal to the Internet

Abstract

For well over a century, the catalog has served libraries and their users as a guide and index to publications collected by an institution. The attributes of the catalog that have made it a valuable resource are desirable traits in any information management tool.The Library catalog user has traditionally assumed that items listed in the catalog were carefully chosen to support an institutional mission and that they were available for her inspection. Internet portals, gateways to the Web, like the catalog, offer access to a wide range of resources, but differ from the catalog in a number of ways, perhaps most significantly in that they facilitate searching and retrieval from a vast, often uncoordinated array of sites, rather than the carefully delimited sphere of the library's collections. Web information has proven much more volatile, ephemeral, and heterogeneous. Can we re-interpret the catalog so that it can serve effectively as a portal to the Internet? Is the catalog the appropriate model for discovery and retrieval of highly dynamic, rapidly multiplying, networked documents? Until relatively recently, the catalog has been the dominant index to published literature for library users. Web portals are rapidly usurping this primacy. Libraries today are struggling as they strain to incorporate a variety of resources in diverse formats in their catalogs and to maintain centrality and relevancy in the digital world. This paper will examine the features of the catalog and their portability to the Web, and will make recommendations about the Library catalog's role in providing access to Internet resources.