Discuss the challenges likely to be encountered by information

professional in organizing the internet resources and suggest possible

solutions

By Kerich Cyrus

Publication Date: August 2015

INTRODUCTION

The internet has become popular all over the world as a research tool (Alasa
and Kalechukwu, 1999). Due to advances in information and communications
technologies (ICTs), the internet has become a multimedia for the development
of electronic resources for quality learning, teaching and research. It has
provided a wider access to global information resources such as online
databases, e-journals, e-prints and other sources of digital information.
Through these resources, the internet has become a major source of
information sharing, as it provides timely access to information anywhere in
the globe without spatial barrier. According to (Al Fadhli and Johnson, 2006),
the internet is also very useful as a communication tool among librarians and
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library clientele; and it is the most efficient means of electronic document

delivery.

Due to the advent of internet, World Wide Web and rise of online catalogue, the
role of information professionals has been changed. They are now more efficient
and have new roles as intermediary, facilitator, end-user trainers, web
organizer & designer, researcher, interface designer, knowledge manager and
sifter of information resources (Rao & Babu, 2001). Information professionals
therefore strive to be knowledgeable in a variety of information sources and
follow the new trends and advancements in computers, media and publishing
(Careeroverview, 2011). This is mainly due to the challenges that come along in
organizing these resources online for ease of access.

Organizing the web and providing users with better ways of finding internet
resources that suit their needs is a problem of current interest to all types of
libraries and information professionals. The rapid growth of information on
internet has resulted inexcessinformation materials in every corner of the
world. However, these materials are not organized properly and differences in
quality and stability also exist. So, it is very difficult to conceptualize, browse,
search, filter or refer to any piece of information. Although cataloguers are
skilled at cataloguing all forms of media, the immense amount of resources on

the web presents an entirely new set of challenges in organizing these

resources.This paper discusses the challenges associated with organization of
internet resources and concludes by highlighting possible solutions to the
challenges discussed.

What is The Internet?

The Internet is a global network of computer networks utilizing a suite of

protocols called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
that supports interconnection of a number of different computer

networks.
It covers large, international Wide Area Network (WANs) as well as smaller
Local Area Networks (LANs) and individual computers connected to the

internet worldwide.
The Internet supports communication and sharing of data, and offers
vast amount of information through a variety of services and tools

What is cataloguing?

Cataloguing is the organization of information for easy retrieval.The main use

of a catalogue is to help the library users in finding or locating the items they
want in the library. It serves the following purposes:
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To find out the availability of resources,

To know the location of the resources.

To bring related resources together.

ORGANIZING THE WEB RESOURCES TRACING THE BACKGROUND

HISTORY

The first method of organizing information on the internet was search engine.
Search engines had an initial information space, which was managed by the
search indexes, they maintained through spiders. But, there were not many
pages to handle, so results returned were manageable. However, search indexes
started faltering with the increasing size of the internet. In addition to this, less
and less of the internet was being indexed and at the same time, user searches
on common terms started returning so many hits. It resulted in increased
recall and decreased precision. At this point, portals such as Yahoo came up to
give a catalogue like structure. This structure allowed for both browsing and
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searching. Although the result was relevant in most of the cases, but the exact
precision of retrieval as facilitated by a catalogue was missing.

Then, the idea of proper cataloguing of web started gaining ground. Here, the
job got defined for trained professional who knew how to order information so
that the system designed not only performs in the short term but is also
capable of coping with the problems in the long term.

The concept of metadata the came into being, while metadata has become a
recent buzzword, then concept has long been familiar to librarians who use the
terms cataloguing or indexing. The MARC (Machine Readable Catalogue)
record used by Librarians to describe resources is one form of metadata.

Since information is needed in all aspects of life we need to organize it, we

organize because we need to retrieve. Retrieval of information is dependent
upon its having been organized. We therefore, organize information so that
others can find it.

Organization of information allows us to keep usable records of human

endeavors for posterity. Organization helps us to arrange the information
through classifying, cataloguing etc (Taylor, 2004).

Today the internet has posed challenges to librarians due to the large amount
of information being generated.

Since Information is organized in such a way that users can get access to it,
that information must be tagged in some fashion so that users can readily
locate it later.

Information organization therefore refers to methods of rendering large

amounts of information into a form that can be stored, retrieved and
manipulated by users or computer system. (Adebanjo, 2009: p 7)

Information organization can also be looked at as the process of information

structuring during content storage and also during search, display and access.
Activities involved in the organization of recorded information are:

Identifying the existence of information packages as they are made

available. (If a book is published or a web site is established but no one
knows about its existence except the creator, it will be of no informational
use to anyone).
Identifying the works contained within those information packages or as
parts of them.
A work may be a collection of different works; a web site may have
information about a famous person which may include individual
digitized works of the person, biographical material and other parts of
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the persons life. These may need to be identified separately. A

photograph may have different things and these may need to be
identified separately.
Systematically, pulling together information packages into collections in
libraries,

and

communication

other
files.

information
This

means

centers
creating

including
collections

internet
including

electronic resources and determining resources to be added into the

collection.
Producing lists of information packages prepared according to standard
rules. This is basically creating retrieval tools.
Providing access points for the information packages.

The activity of providing access points adds value to the usefulness and
retrieval potential of a collection.

Providing means of locating each information package.

This is the most important because this activity will assist in access and
retrieval. Organizing information does not only bring all the same information
together but also pinpoints the differences and assists users in selecting from
the alternatives. The main objective of information organization is to provide
structured access to information.

The main concern of information professionals is to provide the right

information to the right user at the right time and in the right format. This
should imply that organization will facilitate efficient collection management
that enables patrons to search, browse, and access and obtain information.

Challenges encountered by information professional in organizing the

internet resources

According to Ramshiri (2007), the World Wide Web has created a difficult
situation for the information professionals in the cataloging community. This is
mainly because the web is dynamic and contains open resource information
materials. Here, anyone can deposit anything at any time and the content of
the web pages also keeps on changing. This seriously poses challenges to
information professionals in trying to organize this information. The main
challenges are as discussed below.

Up-to-date print resources on Internet-related topics are hard to find

since Internet issues often change and develop faster than books and
articles can make it into print. Books on libraries and the Internet tend
to give general overviews of metadata or internet cataloging, without
going into detail about specific cataloging standards and procedures.

The internet sources are difficult to organize because some of the

authors are not authoritative, informational professionals would have a
problem in categorizing them since anybody can put his or her
information in the internet regardless of their position in society and this
poses a challenge when organizing these resources.

Lack of universally accepted controlled vocabulary. There is no source

accepted by web creators that gives authority to the vocabulary words
assigned to a site. Asking a web author to tag a site is like asking a book
author to make his own MARC record after writing his book. This has
always been the function of skilled librarians, using the common tools of
authority lists, classification systems, or shared databases

Lack of stability due to frequency of changes in information. If a book

changes, it becomes a new edition with a new bibliographic record.
Serials, also known as magazines, change frequently, but the change is
predictable. In other words, the change could happen daily, monthly, or
yearly, depending on the frequency of publication. The web sites on the
internet change erratically. Cataloging with a system using a main entry
and added entries would not work because there is no main entry.
Therefore it becomes very 'difficult to justify the time and expense of
doing MARC cataloging of Internet materials on a large scale because
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what you have to catalog is so fluid. You go to the Web on a certain day
and the item is there. Return in six months and it's not there. Or it's still
there but has changed so dramatically that the record doesn't match
anymore.

Lack of quality standards. Authors approach a publisher who has a legal

obligation and a professional reputation to produce a quality product.
Librarians rely on consistent quality from reputable publishers to set the
standards. One thing books had that resources on the internet do not
have is the accountability of a publisher. Publishers have a legal
obligation to print the verifiable truth. They edit the content, structure,
and grammar of their publications. They also verify the sources
mentioned. So, this brings up the issue as to whether the internet is
even worth the time to catalog due to the varied quality.

Lack of adequate physical description.Internet resources often do not

provide the standard bibliographic information that AACR2 requires.
Terms such as author, title, and publication information are most often
not available for the cataloguers to work with. This causes a major
setback for cataloguers as they will have to spend more time than
necessary on such resources in a bid to find alternative means by which
access points can be created for such resources.
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Copyright challenge. Electronic resources, especially those found on the

web, need to be handled with utmost sensitivity. Cataloguers would be
violating copyright laws by cataloguing such resources and including it in
their institutional database without the permission of the author or
publisher. This implies that libraries, in addition to their obligations, have
to ensure that users behave responsibly within the limit allowed by the
copyright. Legislation in the exploitation of copyrighted resources must
also put necessary safe guards in place to ensure that nothing is done to
violate the terms of a license agreement as it relates to licensed electronic
resources.

The scope of information organization could be as broad, or as narrow, as

one wishes to define. It could cover a particular type of resources such as
finding aids or literary texts. It could also cover all types of resources
sound, video, multimedia, text, and so on found on the Internet. There
is need to know about more than one metadata standard if we are to
create an information system that provides access to information of
various formats.

Solutions

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The nature and variety of resources on the Internet underscore the need for
information organization in the digital age (e.g. Levy, 1995; Lynch, 1997). The
question is whether cataloging is the answer. Critics of cataloging standards
have denounced their complexity and cost of implementation, and have
proposed simpler solutions such as Dublin Core (Chepesiuk, 1999; Medeiros,
2000; Hakala et al., 1998; Tennant, 1998). On the other hand, many
practitioners and researchers have concluded that cataloging principles can be
applied to digital resources (Mandel and Wolven, 1996) and that it is
worthwhile to catalog important Internet resources for users because such
efforts add value to the resources by collocating materials, facilitating access,
and saving time (Gorman, 1999; Oder, 1998; Veatch, 1999). In response to the
changing information environment, an IFLA (International Federation of
Library Associations and Institutions) study group investigated the functional
requirements for bibliographic records (IFLA, 1998), and researchers and
practitioners convened at an international conference to discuss the principles
and development of AACR (Americal Library Association, 1998). As catalogers
gain more experience in cataloging Internet resources, they have begun to
review the cataloging process and re-examine the content and encoding of
bibliographic records.

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Working Group 1 of the CC:DA (Committee on Cataloging: Description and

Access) Task Force on Metadata, for example, examined libraries' resource
description needs and proposed a serious review of the elements in
bibliographic records (CC:DA, 1999). The USMARC listserv had lively
discussions on XML MARC in April 2000. In addition, Hopkinson (1999)
explained the limitations and strengths of MARC, and Hakala (1999) stated
that new tools such as Dublin Core elements have been used to organize
electronic documents and would co-exist with MARC formats.

Some of the solutions proposed include the following;

Investigating changes to cataloguing practices and policies to make them

more adaptable to accessing the proliferation and diversity of Web
resources.
Fostering standards to enable metadata communities to meet the
discovery and retrieval needs of Internet users.
Promoting wider use of established subject heading thesauri and
classification

systems

for

more

effective

resource

discovery

and

organization for research and reference.

Bring stakeholders together in developing guidelines to support record
sharing in the future, thus bringing out the need to coordinate efforts to
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avoid duplication in record creation for purposes of standardization in

the area of internet resource classification and organization
Encourage catalogers and indexers to stay in touch with library science
literature, and literature on the future of information organization,
particularly cataloging, and the future of the profession, to enable them
keep abreast of new developments
Adopting the various methods of information organization, including
electronic pathfinders, bibliographic records, electronic texts, and online
finding aids. There are also new standards that include; HTML, AACR2R,
Dublin Core, TEI, and EAD.
Regulate the inclusion of details about a type of resource that is so
dynamic in nature. The structure of AACR2R probably should be
simplified if we were to use it to represent Internet resources. Also,
Dublin Core needs to be reviewed to meet the goals of information
organization and to reconsider which elements are essential to achieve
those goals.

References

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Tennant, R (1998), "The art and science of digital bibliography", Library

Journal, Vol. 123 No.17, pp.28

Ingrid Hsieh Yee (2000), Organizing internet resources; Teaching cataloging

standards and beyond, OCLC Systems & Services, Vol. 16 No.3, pp 130-143.

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