From: tdowling@lib.washington.edu (Thomas Dowling)
Subject: Re: Providing internet access in a library
Organization: University of Washington Libraries
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 00:38:32 GMT

In article <Bs21pv.n27@csn.org>, nancy@teal.csn.org (Nancy T. Lombardo) writes:
> Money is a huge problem, but it is not the sole obstacle to offering
> Internet access to the patrons at the library. There are many problems
> associated with this proposal, but I believe they can be overcome with
> some effort. One of the biggest problems is training, exacerbated by the
> difficult interface most users encounter using the Internet. How many public
> librarians know how to proficiently navigate the Internet themselves, let
> alone feel confident enough to teach their patrons? Even with easy access
> to an Internet account, many librarians feel too overwhelmed by the
> multitude of electronic tools already at their disposal to see the value
> of learning another, more cryptic and less organized tool for information
> retrieval. Why go searching for an informational needle in the Internet
> haystack when you can use DIALOG, on which you've had adequate training
> and which meets your librarian's standards for logical and effective use?
> 
> Until the interface is improved, making the use of the Internet easy and
> intuitive, librarians will be hesitant to expend much energy trying to
> figure it out...


I don't want to come off sounding like I'm flaming an article that address some very good points.  But I do have problems with criticisms of the Internet's "interface".  What interface?

Is the concern about the telnet interface?  Surely that's a problem with the host at the other end, and possibly with some menuing system in the middle; telnet itself doesn't really have an interface.  What interface there is, is provided by CARL, or Melvyl, or a Unix or VMS account, etc. etc.  There are getting to be some very nifty client-server applications that run on the Internet (the GUI front end to our locally loaded databases can be a lot of fun), but don't expect them to be prevalent before too l




ong, and don't expect them to be predicated on 2400 bps connections.

Is it the interface to an e-mail program?  I've probably used a dozen e-mail programs to send and receive Internet e-mail.  Some are good and some are bad (some are *really* bad), but none of them owes its interface to the Internet.

Likewise with Usenet news.  If I only had access to rn, I probably wouldn't be here now (in a virtual sense, of course).  Instead, I have access to xrn, which has loads of room for improvement but is definitely a kinder, gentler interface to news.

I'll grant that most ftp versions are pretty abstruse, but xarchie does a decent job of both looking for the file I want and getting it for me.


As a corollary, let me ask that, as people discuss Internet access, they provide a definition of it as they envision it for their institutions.  Sometimes people ask for Internet access, but on closer inspection only really need e-mail, and Internet e-mail increasingly goes just about anywhere (sometimes for a fee).  CompuServe, MCI Mail, and Fidonet bulletin boards can all send to and receive from Internet addresses, and I'm sure there are other services I don't know about.  If that's the service we want 




to get people to, I think there are easier ways than getting on the Internet.

If we really want to connect people to interactive services running on Internet hosts, we need to be up front (with our staff, our users, and not least with ourselves) about the training and support issues involved.  We also need to be up front about the possibilities for coordinating the information that flows through the Internet.  I like the gopher model, but few gopher services have any identifiable quality control.  Archie will find you a lot of files available for ftp, but only from the sites it know




s about, and only if you know what to ask for; SIMTEL doesn't exactly have abstracts to search.  And it's easy to make a menu system for connecting to library catalogs (harder to make a helpful one, though), but there's not too much on the horizon for helping people decide *which* catalogs to use. (I guess our jobs are safe for a while).


Thomas Dowling
University of Washington Libraries
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Newsgroups: soc.libraries.talk