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For many years, catalogs have served as the gateway to library collections; our collections are inaccessible without them. This picture is rapidly changing with the current explosion of online resources. The new gateway is the World Wide Web. Should we attempt to accommodate the new resources in the old gateway? Libraries have struck various balances between what is accessed via their catalog versus their web site, but creating lists of online resources on the Web is always part of the solution. The author points out deficiencies of our catalogs that have led us to this point of creating a parallel "catalog" on our web sites. The author also offers some powerful reasons why focusing access on the Web makes sense now.
For the past 25 years, OPACs have been at the center of the library world. That era is over. Ask any patron how many times a week he uses an OPAC and how many times a week he uses a web search engine. The answer to that question should scare us.
Stuart Weibel, quoted in Chepesiuk (1999, 63)
Over the past ten years, selection and acquisition of electronic resources have gradually been brought into the mainstream of our collection development and technical services operations. The same has not happened with our catalogs. One of the primary functions of library web sites today is to provide lists of resources available in (or through) the library. Why do we do this, when we all have expensive integrated library systems, complete with web-based catalogs, whose function it is to provide access to our collections? Clearly, we create lists because we feel that those catalogs are not meeting our users' needs, but if we're ever going to improve on current practice, we need to look deeper at where we stand now.
In making these comments, I am envisioning academic libraries of all sizes. The future of the online catalog in public libraries has been actively debated in the library profession since Coffman's (1999) article "Building Earth's Largest Library" appeared last year. Our users are different, as are our collections and our missions. Some would argue that the two library communities are becoming more rather than less different with the digital revolution.
We have a public...