I thought I'd chime in a bit on Bill Landis' important thread on remote access
to finding aids...
 
I'm very receptive to Bill Landis' point about remote user understanding of
finding aids - the same point was made about remote understanding of catalog
records as early as 1989 by Tom Hickerson and raised again in my paper with
Pearce-Moses in American Archivist a year or two ago...One of the principle
advantages of loading into gophers and web pages was supposed to be the ease
which you moved your guides from wordprocessing to the internet - we now know
that this is not a transparent exercise, but involves a significant amount of
prep time and technical knowledge. Implementing this technology should be a
management decision based upon the time necessary to convert versus the
expected benefit in terms of expanded user access.
 
Unfortunately we can't really make this analysis since we have no information
on internet user access. All we have are anecdotes. Assessing the true
benefits of this access also involves patron understanding of the information
presented. I think Landis is right that when the internet patrons don't find
what they need fairly quickly, they don't pick up the phone - they switch to a
different gopher or web page.
 
Nevertheless, I think it is incumbent upon those who mount information on the
net to provide HELP....A document from the National Agricultural Library
recently came my way that described standards for gopher files - one of
which was a nice four or five line header showing date of the file, file size,
update frequency, and the name and internet address of the person responsible
for the post. Help is theoretically available for the NAL gopher files.
 
In this age of McDonald's type information services providers need to be
particularly aware of their RESPONSIBILITY to provide accurate information and
to be ACCOUNTABLE for what they load on the net. Hopefully the ethics of
loading information on the network will someday be adopted as fast as we adopt
the technology. It's not enough to implement new technology, we need to
develop the wisdom to use it in constructive, rather than destructive, ways.
 
I'm not really a Luddite - but I'm not convinced that we're providing good
service by loading files on the internet without proper formatting,
accountability and available help! At least NAL took the time to think this
through a bit!
 
Rob Spindler, Archives & Manuscripts, Arizona State      {|}
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