International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Internet Tangles to Avoid

Sidney Jackson Jowers

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

On 25th January 1996, The Independent newspaper printed “There is too little information of high quality available on the Net, and retrieval times are too slow, to justify talk of an information super-highway”. To you, who are now creating the high quality information, I offer some guidelines.

1. Use your name and address in each file: museums are known to be particularly bad in this respect! The classic case is The Natural History Museum, London, which could not be found by its name, however, “dinosaurs” worked.

2. Create clear and simple instructions on how to get into your files. Potential users may not be experts, and the experts will develop their own shortcuts.

3. Use as many key words in your files as you can muster. “Costume” may not readily come to mind when describing your theatre resource, and a potential user, like me, might not find you. [I have, for your perusal, “Yahoo Search Results” for Costuming Resources Online.]

4. Run a digest version of the file; a boon where the user pays per item read.

5. There is a need to be selective when providing bibliographies to your users. The temptation to “show-off” a long list should be resisted. It is easy to perpetuate mistakes where you do not actually check the references you offer. There is also the potential colossal waste of librarians' time. In a computer search of the University of California’s holdings at Berkeley, I was excited to find the 1971 PhD thesis “An annotated and critical bibliography of the works written in English since 1900 on the pre- and post-revolutionary Russian theatre”. It seemed to offer just what I wanted to find books published on Russian theatrical costume design during this period.
The British Library ordered it for me through University Microfilms, and when it arrived several months later, imagine my disappointment to find only four references to costume (none new to me), and chagrin at the waste of the librarians' effort and time.

6. Keep merely decorative graphic details to a minimum. A Regency wallpaper effect may be fun for you to design, but takes too long for the user to process.

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels17.html