These thoughts have grown out of observations and ideas that have arisen during the development of WWlib , a classified, searchable catalogue of UK WWW pages. The vast scale and information richness of the Internet requires some sort of catalogue to navigate the riches. This has been obvious to both Internet users and librarians for several years, however the two groups have taken very different approaches.
Librarians are already familiar with disciplines of cataloguing and classifying their collections.
There is a substantial amount of specialised software, standardised catalogue formats and a lively approach to the use of Internet tools especially Gopher and Wais . Unfortunately many non-professional library users have little awareness of the extent of these developments. Internet users have always wanted help to find things quickly and various forms of indexing and searching such as Archie and Veronica have been developed. Making the Internet and all its resources readily accessible to the non-computer specialist. Allowing anyone to create publically accessible resources.