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Within two years, LibraryLand, a Web site created in 1996 to organize unannotated bookmarks of other library science-related sites, had expanded to unmanageable proportions. The site's authors cast about for solutions to carry forth the original goals ofthe site while containing the labor involved in its maintenance. The solution settled upon might be a new evolutionary trend oflarge-scale link sites-transformation into specialized indexing services spanning many remote servers.
At the Ramapo Catskill Library System (RCLS), we recently faced a dilemma involving one of the Web sites we maintain. The site is named LibraryLand, and it aims to be a comprehensive resource guide listing Web links of interest to librarians. It was begun with the dual goals of organizing/sharing bookmark files within our library system and promoting the utility of the Web to hesitant member library boards and directors. When this site was launched in early 1996, the scope of the project appeared to be ambitious but manageable, but by 1998 we had to concede that our reach exceeded our grasp. The maintenance of the LibraryLand site was straying more and more beyond our mission as an organization and was consuming a disproportionate amount of time and labor. Therefore, we were faced with the options of leaving LibraryLand to wither on the vine or to limit its scope, or of streamlining its maintenance to be much less time-consuming.
Large Resource
Guide Sites Are Black Holes
To get a better idea of the scale of the maintenance problem we're talking about, let's describe LibraryLand (circa 1999) in more detail. LibraryLand organized URLs into traditional library service disciplines, such as Technical Services, Serials, Automation, Children's Services, and so on. Within each of those broad categories, another layer of specific categories was created as needed to break out groups of URLs to be easily scanned by the eye. Therefore, LibraryLand was a Yahoo-like subject hierarchy of two tiers. Each category and subcategory was formatted as a separate HTML page. By mid- 1998, there were eighteen broad categories and about 150 more specific categories within those eighteen broad categories, each a separate HTML document. Within these pages, LibraryLand included approximately 4,300 URLs. The listings did not include annotations, ratings, or evaluations, but did include a small icon signifying...