Fact Finders
Librarians lead the way through the electronic jungle
Archived article from May 12, 2003
By Patricia Lamiell
Rutgers librarians are no longer simply guardians of printed information. In the world of Web-based communication, they are the guides, leading faculty and students through the thicket of electronic information and reaching deeper than ever before into instructional and research activities around campus. The Internet has transformed the Rutgers University. Libraries system into facilitator, custodian, disseminator and creator of intellectual assets, and, as the brief profiles below demonstrate, brought to its librarians both opportunities and challenges.
Ask a Librarian
Librarians call it the Google problem. The Internet is bursting with information, some of it useful, much of it not. Plug a few words into a commercial search engine, and out it spills. But how to find that needle of truly useful, accurate information, supported by research and vetted by academic authorities, in the bewildering haystack of verbiage?
At Rutgers, one reliable answer is "Ask a Librarian," a program that allows students, faculty and staff at any campus to send e-mail queries to a Rutgers reference librarian. Users get fast, professional help in navigating the World Wide Web and evaluating information for relevance and credibility.
"I use Google about 90 times a day. It's a wonderful resource," says Natalie Borisovets, librarian at the university's John Cotton Dana Library on the Newark campus and director of Ask a Librarian. "But you have to know what you're looking for. You can get all kinds of wonderfully erroneous information."
While Ask a Librarian usually responds within 24 hours, and in many cases much more quickly, the libraries are experimenting with even faster, real-time online assistance that enables a librarian to walk a researcher through a database search as it is displayed on the computer screen.
Ask a Librarian, which services the Rutgers community in Newark, New Brunswick, Camden and worldwide, fielded 12,000 queries in the last academic year, up from a few hundred in 1998, when it started.
Moving images
Walking every day through the stacks to her office at the Library Technical and Automated Services building in New Brunswick, Grace Agnew has trouble getting past the newly acquired books waiting to be catalogued. Particularly hard to pass up are the books about film, a pet personal interest. One recent day, "The Brooklyn Film" and "Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy" beckoned. "Horror at the Drive-In" proved too enticing. "Oh, I have to borrow this!" she says, plucking it off the shelf.
As director of the Moving Images Collection project, Agnew combines her longtime interest in film with her substantial technological expertise. The project will develop a database of catalogs containing film, video and digital moving images related to science for classroom use. Agnew hopes the database can be expanded to include other types of moving images, such as entertainment films.
Agnew, associate university librarian for digital library systems, arrived in New Brunswick in January 2002 to manage and improve the libraries' information technology. While shuffling a miniature Slinky during a recent interview, she made clear claim to the fast lane of library technology as she talked about "metadata," which she called "just a fancy word for cataloging."
Agnew creates metadata by developing databases of catalogs, such as the Moving Images Collection, which can be searched by any type of computer, no matter how the information is organized or in what format.
In the past, metadata was strictly used to catalog information such as books or journals, so that users could find it on a library shelf. Now, metadata can change dynamically, describing the same information in different ways, depending on who is using it. For example, a high school science teacher could search metadata for information about a film based on the intended age or educational level of the viewer. A scientist could search for information about the same film according to its content, a historian by its history or provenance.
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