3 Librarians who find things do so by defining the question and constructing a query. Librarians who put things away do so by describing the object and revealing its content and relationship within the context of other objects already in the catalog. At their worst, librarians who are good at finding things are passive consumers and critics of the systems available to them, while librarians who are good at putting things away become slaves to the internal coherence of the system rather than to its meaning or the users. At its best, the catalog provides a bridge between these two pieces of the process, creating a communication tool for these two moments or actors in the process. On an intranet, selection on the basis of boundary and community is replaced by simple accumulation.
Contribution is done by a set of publishers that has technology, access, and authority.
On an intranet, the community becomes those who create the collection. In the catalog, as I ve described, the meaning is defined in relationship to the user, who is anticipated by the vocabulary and location of the pieces in the collection. On the intranet, or the Internet, meaning is defined only by those who publish the information, which leaves the users to fend for themselves as they try to use the information with no intermediary. After it has been indexed, one could say that meaning on an intranet or the Internet is defined by those who try to organize or filter it after the fact. When we take the elements of a catalog and reconstruct them in the environment of an intranet we can see that all of the same elements are there, but they take on quite different characteristics.