Managing the Web
Selecting the Wheat from the Chaff

Web sites in religion and theology, harvested through any of the available Internet browser search engines, exist in the thousands on the World Wide Web. Only a small sub-set of these is appropriate for inclusion in library catalogs of graduate academic programs in universities and seminaries. There have been many web portals created by theological librarians that provide access to selected web sites. As valuable as these sites have become to information specialists and to patrons, they fall short of the bibliographic and subject analysis provided through traditional cataloging. There is also the loss of one of the main functions of the online catalog, to serve as the tool for the collocation of material of varying formats on a given subject.

One way for librarians to manage web resources would be to develop a workflow, similar to the workflow used for managing traditional library materials. This would include establishing criteria for selection, providing full bibliographic records for the library catalog, and developing procedures for continued maintenance of bibliographic information. Assuming that most, if not all, ATLA member institutions are not able to hire staff specifically for the task of managing web resources, this proposal offers an alternative subject (religion and theology) / association-based (ATLA) approach.

Proposal

A task force of ATLA members would be recruited in sufficient numbers to divide into three groups. A group of reference/collection development librarians would select the web sites using agreed upon criteria. Suggestions of web sites to consider could come from the entire membership using an online form, increasing the likelihood that valuable web sites would not be overlooked and that new sites would be identified and cataloged early. Many of these sites would already have good OCLC records

A second group, consisting of technical services librarians, would create OCLC records or enhance existing records. These OCLC records would be tagged as ATLA Selections in a MARC field (negotiated with OCLC) that would allow an identifying string “ATLA Web Project” to function as a search term in WORLDCAT. Web sites that already have good OCLC records available would be tagged as well.

A third group would be responsible for maintenance (URL changes, disappearance the site, significant changes in metadata, etc.). This group would register with OCLC to create PURLs, and develop a procedure for editing OCLC records and notifying the ATLA membership about changes.

ATLA would negotiate the following with OCLC:

· Identification of a MARC field that would accommodate a text sting such as “ATLA Web Project”. This field would be searchable in WORLDCAT and serve as a qualifier in search strategies.

· ATLA tagged records could be harvested and downloaded as a group into local OPACs.

· The ATLA tagged records could be deleted as a group from local OPACs and replaced by downloading the newest version of the ATLA Web Project records in OCLC.

Examples of Some Excellent Web Sites in Religion and Theology

The selection below represents only a sample of some of the more significant publicly accessible sites on the web. Most of the sites have some sort of institutional affiliation or sponsorship and provide a resource that would be of considerable value to scholars in the fields of religion and theology.