Harvesting Hyperspace: Developing Technological Solutions to Internet Resource Discovery and Description

Abstract

Many students and faculty make use of Internet search engines to locate information on the World Wide Web. The increasing interest in these resources challenges collection development specialists to find more resources, technical services librarians to describe them, and public services librarians to support them. This paper addresses experiments underway in the Technical Services unit of the Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University to make use of the underlying World Wide Web indexing technologies in a local setting, to develop new ways for catalogers to approach Internet resources, and to discover cost effective methods for approaching the wealth of resources available on the Internet. We have worked to link this new, more detailed information into the Cornell University Library Gateway, a local database of network-accessible resources. The authors discuss technological solutions for indexing large aggregations of Web resources, electronic serials, Web sites containing multiple file formats and Web sites that make use of frames.