Directory of Library Technical Services Home Pages

Citation

Shelton, M.E. (1999), "Directory of Library Technical Services Home Pages", Collection Building, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 176-178. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.1999.18.4.176.2

Barbara Stewart provides an extensive listing of Internet home pages in this volume of the Neal‐Schuman NetGuide Series. With a focus on library technical services the work is divided into sections for acquisitions librarians, cataloguing librarians, and a short section on sites of general interest to a technical services librarian. The acquisitions librarian will find information on vendors and publishers dealing with an array of subjects and material types, including sources for rare and out‐of‐print books. Gift and exchange programmes, acquisitions department home pages, and sources of information on currency rates, e‐journals, listservs, and newsletters round out the sites listed in this section. For the cataloguer, there are site lists that cover cataloguing in general, the largest section in the book, authority control, classification and indexing, bibliographic record formats, and the cataloguing of special formats and subjects. Some topics of special interest to cataloguers, including cataloguing workstations, automation vendors, and outsourcing, are also addressed. The sites listed as being of general interest are those comprehensive sites that deal with acquisitions, cataloguing, and preservation.

The author provides an annotation for many, but not all, of the sites listed in the book. The annotations range in length and often point out distinguishing features of the sites. The order of the listings in each chapter is alphabetical by the home page title, which can make it difficult to locate some material in the book. A poor index, which contains errors, contributes to the difficulty in locating information in this directory.

Although this list of sites is extensive, the reader will discover some major sites excluded. Some notable sites that have been excluded are Barnes and Noble, WLN, Brodart, and the ICONCLASS site, a classification and indexing scheme for art and architecture. Like other titles in the series there is ample white space left on the pages for notes or adding other sites of choice. With some Web sites providing a majority of this information, including Barbara Stewart’s own Top 200 Technical Services Benefits of Home Page Development site listings page, the reader will find few benefits provided in this title that cannot be found free on the Web.