he 'Library and Information Science' section is BUBL's greatest asset, and has no serious
international competition. BUBL should concentrate on making further improvements to this already
strong service.
I regularly use many of the links, particularly the collection of information files from other services, electronic conferences and institutions. The BUBL's Journals Tables of Contents is an outstanding resource, as are New Book Publications in LIS (a selection from BookData), the electronic journals archive, the conference announcements, the News section; directories, glossaries and the information networking section. All represent excellent resources in their own right.
Organising all the material using Web pages would allow a further improvement of the quality of
presentation, descriptions of resources and the links between different sections. At present, the huge
Gopher hierarchy is kept separate and completely hidden behind the label LIS Resources via the
BUBL Gopher, which is just one among several links under LIS resources located on BUBL.
The collection of Web links contained in LIS resources available via BUBL is arranged alphabetically, which is not the most helpful order. In addition, it is very difficult for the user to find the principles behind keyword formation for filing purposes. For example, Denmark's Technological Library in Copenhagen is placed under the keyword 'Denmark', but the filing keyword for Sweden's most important national medical library, the Karolinska Institute Library, is 'Karolinska'. A uniform principle must apply in keyword choice - country, place, name or subject keyword.
It would be useful to know what standards BUBL applies in various areas: selection criteria and quality assessment, the choice of a subject structure or a classification scheme, and the level of detail of annotation.
There is still some material left on the BUBL Gopher server which is not strongly or exclusively related to LIS. Network tools are still available, for example, although a much more comprehensive list is found within the Web service. A consequence of the non-completion of the transition to WWW is section 15 - BUBL Subject Tree: Library and Information Science Area, which has Gopher and telnet links in alphabetical order (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/Link/Tree/Library). In the WWW menu (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Library.html), covering the same subject, there also appear gopher links, besides http and ftp.
Information about resources should be kept apart from the resources themselves, and so should archival material from current information. Clearer audience guidance would also be an advantage. It is not always obvious which resources are mostly of UK interest, and which are directed towards an international audience.
Section 17, OPACs, Library Catalogues via NISS (UK) and Hytelnet (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/OPACS) is unsatisfactory for such an important LIS resource. Only a Hytelnet link and a telnet link to the NISS UK OPAC list is provided. Services Arranged by Type from the Web home page points to a couple of other links in BUBL's Gopher (gopher://bubl.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/Type) and the Web version of the UK OPAC list at NISS. These pointers to OPACs should be improved. There are a lot of usable lists of international OPACs, reachable by telnet, via Gopher or WWW
I hope that it will prove possible to keep most of the services up-to-date. Some of the journal TOCs (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/E/E2) seem not to be current (for example, at the time of writing, recent issues of Internet World are missing). Library and IT journals dominate this section, and clarity would be better served by non-LIS journals being placed in a separate collection.
A transition to WWW would allow improvements to the excellent conference section (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/H/H1/H1F) with links to follow-up material, publications and authors. A useful feature in section: 06 - Electronic Mail Discussion Lists (gopher://ukoln.bath.ac.uk:7070/11/BUBL_Main_Menu/F) would be the addition of links to the Hypermail archives of library conferences at Mailbase.
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