SSG‐FI – special subject gateways to high quality Internet resources for scientific users
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520010320149 |
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| Pages | 64-68 |
| Author | Thomas Fischer,Heike Neuroth |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
SSG-FI ± special subject
gateways to high
quality Internet
resources for scientific
users
Thomas Fischer and
Heike Neuroth
Academic libraries and the World Wide
Web
The State and University Library (SUB) in
GoÈttingen is a major source for scienti fic
literature in Germany. In addition to catering
to the Georg-August-University at GoÈ ttingen
and the state of Lower Saxony, the SUB
provides services within the system of
``Special subject collections'', set up by the
``Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft'' (DFG).
In particular, the SUB GoÈttingen houses the
special subject area collections for pure
mathematics, a major part of earth sciences
and collections related to the Anglo-American
culture. Within this system, the affiliated
libraries try to acquire all related scholarly
relevant material published around the world
and to make it available to German
researchers. In this context deliberations
arose about the increasing importance of the
Internet or World Wide Web with respect to
scientific or scholarly research. Since the
library's responsibility towards the scientific
community is to provide access to resources
of academic relevance, the question is how to
deal with Internet resources.
The standard WWW method to find
information is to employ one of the freely
available search engines, like AltaVista, or to
use one of the available directories, like
Yahoo! The search methods give reasonable
results only if the request can be described by
special technical terms, which are not part of
the everyday language, and the directories are
made for general interests, so browsing will
usually not yield the desired academic
material.
A general approach to improve this
situation is the addition of metadata to the
given Internet resources, like the ones
developed by the Dublin Core initiative. But
only now the basic standards are fixed, and it
will be quite a while until the relevant material
is furnished with metadata. Furthermore, the
major search engines still tend to ignore the
Dublin Core metadata altogether.
Since the WWW does not provide a
solution to the problem of finding and
accessing the relevant documents, academic
libraries have to take the responsibility for
describing this material. These are the basic
considerations behind the launch of the
``Sondersammelgebiets-Fachinformations
project'' (SSG-FI)[1] at the beginning of
1996. The SSG-FI project was financed by
The authors
Thomas Fischer and Heike Neuroth are both based at
The State and University Library, GoÈ ttingen, Germany.
Keywords
Academic libraries, Internet, Information retrieval,
Collection development, Science
Abstract
Project SSG-FI at the Lower Saxony State and University
Library, GoÈttingen (Germany) provides special subject
gateways to international high quality Internet resources
for scientific users. Internet sites are selected by subject
specialists and described using an extension of qualified
Dublin Core metadata. A basic evaluation is added. These
descriptions are freely available and can be searched and
browsed. There are now subject gateways for three
subject areas: earth sciences (Geo-guide); mathematics
(Mathguide); and Anglo-American culture (split into
History guide and Anglistik guide). Together they receive
about 3,300 ``hard'' requests per day, thus reaching over 1
million requests per year. The project SSG-FI behind these
guides is open to collaboration. Institutions and private
persons wishing to contribute can notify the SSG-FI team
or send full data sets. Regular contributors can request
registration with the project to access the database via
the Internet and create and edit records.
Electronic access
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emerald-library.com
Service profiles
64
Online Information Review
Volume 24 .Number 1 .2000 .pp. 64±68
#MCB University Press .ISSN 1468-4527
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