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Keywords
Databases, Internet, Information services, Computer programming, Information resources management
Abstract
The Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC) created New Horizons in Scholarly Communication as a Web site directory of online resources targeting academic information technology. The article covers the initial site development, and the move to dynamic site management using a database. Discusses the successful application of the Web-compatible Filemaker Pro database and the Lasso Web site management software for multiple library information service purposes, and a later move to the ZOPE and SQL platforms.
In 1995, the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC) launched New Horizons in Scholarly Communication[1]. This service, a directory of online resources, highlights emerging information technologies, with a focus on issues affecting their adoption in the academic world. The editorial board track projects, discussion papers, reports, standards, organizations, conferences, workshops, and periodicals relevant to these issues.
From its modest beginnings of a few dozen items listed in a single page, New Horizons grew rapidly with the availability of relevant material on the Web. Within only a few months of its launch, the site was reorganized into a multi-- paged listing broken into subject categories. Even this turned out to be a short-lived solution as the number of items grew beyond a couple of hundred. The longer and longer lists on each page made items increasingly inaccessible to users. In addition, the site managers were having more trouble knowing whether and where anything was listed. By late 1995 another reorganization was imminent.
Fortunately, the New Horizons board included some of the leaders in Web development in the library world: they argued persuasively for moving the site to a "dynamic" platform, one that would generate pages "on the fly" from content residing in a database. (The term "dynamic" denotes pages assembled from real-time data at the point they are requested, as opposed to "static" pages, which are the same every time they are viewed.)
At that time, tools for developing even simple Web sites were few and far between. Leadingedge site development, such as dynamic pages, usually required homemade applications often written in the Perl scripting language or more advanced programming languages such as C++. Though New Horizons did not have the...