Managing Information on the Web

The gigantic amount of information that is produced everyday on the web in different formats (blogs, websites, multimedia…) requires more attention from librarians than print resources whose vendors and agents are known and their collection development strategies are very well established. Therefore, collection development librarians are expected to get additional skills in order to acquire, evaluate, preserve, and provide access to these resources. Librarians should use traditional selection skills that they already have and should learn other skills such as technology which they need to successfully locate and identify web resources. The most challenging step is to find relevant information on the web. Librarians involved in selection on the web should be subject specialists because no controlled vocabularies are available on the web and librarians are expected to use their own knowledge to find useful and authoritative information. Also, technology skills are very important because information is available in different formats and websites are built by different programming languages (HTML, PHP, JAVA…). Not all websites on the internet are indexed by search engines since some websites won’t allow crawling software, such as the one used by Google and other search engines, to index their contents therefore these websites cannot be located by browsing search engines. For this reason, librarians should use different strategies to locate these websites that they can be highly relevant sometimes. The evaluation of information and resources available online is very crucial. Users in general and students is specific have the tendency to trust everything they found on the internet and to take it as face value. The job of librarians is to evaluate web-resources and to make sure that they recommend authoritative information only. The internet includes many open-access resources yet not all of them are valuable, librarians should transfer the selection skills that they master in the print world to the web, and to provide authoritative, recent, and trusted resources to end-users. The preservation of resources on the web is also important since electronic information is not permanent. Websites are always changing and information can easily disappear. Few libraries are using their own crawling software to surf websites according to a specific subject, to index their materials, and to save them on servers so they can be preserved permanently. Yet, this practice is not very familiar since it requires a lot of work to locate web resources and to index them in a searchable way, also the storage space required to save these resources is very high. Finally, information located on the web will be useless if it cannot be accessed. Therefore, librarians are required to provide access to this information and make it available to the public. Metadata librarians are highly demanded these days to describe the content of web-resources and make them searchable. Librarians tend to gather web-resources in subject guides with a description of each resource (metadata) and make them available on the library’s website. For those who use crawling software, information can be searched by keywords yet the searching strategies are not very well developed. In conclusion, collection development librarians are expected to acquire technology skills, and to develop new strategies in addition to traditional strategies for the selection of information on the web. In the web world, librarians can only rely on their skills while in the print world agents and vendors are considered a major help for librarians in collection development and selection of materials.