Reviewed:
11th November 1996
By:
Lorcan Dempsey
The M25 Consortium is a group of about 100 libraries from 37 universities in an area bounded by or near the motorway. This is a web site created by the consortium to help guide users who wish to make use of their collective library resource, claimed to represent about 20% of UK library collections. The web site is interesting: both for what it is and for what it is not.
What is there is impressive; rather more, maybe, for the level of achieved co-operative work it represents and for the direction it implies than for the actual service. The aims are to allow a user to find which libraries have collections in a particular subject area, to check on the accessibility of particular libraries (location, opening hours, and access policies), and to search individual library OPACs. The libraries have been divided into zones. Each library is assigned a number of 'subjects' which represent those areas in which 'sizeable collections' are held. To identify libraries of potential interest a user can browse a library list, click on a sensitive map, or search by some combination of subject and zone. When a library is selected the user is passed through to a local library page which conforms to a descriptive template listing collection subjects, a link to the OPAC and other relevant local pages, contact details, information on accessibility and local travel details. Levels of quality control and consistency across the pages seem to be high and this contributes to a sense of operating within a managed environment. There is the odd glitch. For example on City University pages a template message about having a telnet application is not removed: in fact City has a web interface toits catalogue.
M25 Consortium Web site
What about use of the service itself? The 'subjects' exhibit the advantages and disadvantages of a relatively short high-level list. I looked at it with a colleague who had an interest in ceramics and weaving. These terms were too specific and we searched under design. Clearly this level of description does not provide great discriminating power between collections, or very much guidance about the specific characteristics of a collection. Indeed, the description of library holdings at collection level is something that increasingly seems desirable in a networked environment. However, what is provided here is an improvement over what is generally available and it does narrow the range of OPACs to be searched. It was interesting how much of a barrier we found having to drop into telnet sessions; the transition to catalogues with web interfaces (from BLCMP or Innovative Interfaces, forexample) was so much smoother. Access to library details is by individual site; however typically one is searching a catalogue of the whole collection. We wondered if this might be confusing: a user will retrieve items for sites other than the one he or she might be interested in.
And what about what is not there? In the UK, libraries have typically developed independently without much reference to a wider library 'system' or with resource sharing in mind. There has been limited support for resource sharing from existing union catalogues and serials data is underdeveloped. A variety of initiatives are now looking at creating organisational and technical frameworks for collaborative and sharing activities in this decentralised and fragmented envrionment. This is an interesting first step. In the medium term levels of service and transparency could be much improved by the development of a supporting protocol and data framework. For example, my colleague was immediately disappointed not to be able to search across selected libraries as a unit: she had to individually visit each one. It might be nice to be able to request an item from a library, or to search a union list of serials, or to navigate with the help of fuller collection-level descriptions. These are the types of things which will save the time of the user, uniting them moreeffectively with relevant material.
I think the Consortium should be congratulated on its achievement. However, it is a part of that achievement to remind the user of how much more could be done and I hope they can put in place funding to enhance the service further.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 11-Jul-1997