The HomePage
Ownership, Access, Retrieval, and Sharing
By Marydee Ojala
Editor • ONLINE
To research a school project when I was a teenager, I
traveled across town to the "big" public library (as opposed
to my school and local public libraries). There, I was
astonished to encounter closed stacks. It had never before
occurred to me that libraries wouldn't want patrons wandering
among the collection, finding interesting reading material.
Today, it seems even more anachronistic.
A decade later, enrolled in a library school just
down the street from the "big" library, I discovered
electronic access to information and a thing called
Dialog. Suddenly, I could reach my electronic hand
behind the librarians guarding those closed stacks
and pull out data. Granted, at that early stage in
online development, I couldn't download the full text
of the books on the shelf; I couldn't even get the
full text of a journal article. It wasn't all that
long in coming, however. Online databases soon expanded
to include access to the full text of articles from
many sources, company directories, and government
documents.
As access expanded, retrieval took center stage.
Information retrieval in the 1980s and 1990s was synonymous
with online searching. Even then, however, some realized
it wasn't just about search and retrieval; it wasn't
about sending out the rescue dogs; it was about finding
stuff—stuff that people wanted to find. Stuff
that wasn't necessarily the full text of published
documents.
The early days of online, I now realize, were somewhat
akin to closed stacks. You had to subscribe and take
extensive training courses—Dialog's introductory
one was a day and a half, as I recall. That created
a group of intermediaries who were almost always librarians.
Odd, librarians moved from keeping people out of the
stacks to standing between them and their access to
electronic information.
Today, the online environments that stressed ownership,
collections, access, and retrieval have been irretrievably
altered. Today, it's about sharing. Collaboration
tools are in vogue. Online discussion lists and blogs
encourage the sharing of thoughts, opinions, expertise,
and even links to journal articles. Desktop search
tools, as discussed by Cindy Chick in this issue,
enable us to combine Web searches with information
on our desktop. Kim Guenther, in her column, points
out that it's OK for multiple people within an organization
to share the Webmaster job title.
As information sharing supplants owning, accessing,
and retrieving it, I think the essential role of the
information professional is vindicated. After all,
isn't sharing information what librarianship is all
about? Procuring information to share freely among
user populations is the underlying ethos of librarianship.
Whether it's a public library book collection, an
academic library's e-journal collection, or a corporate
digital library, sharing of information is integral
to the process. It's nice to know that information
professionals are not only participating in the new
online world, but that our philosophy is its guiding
principle. We are the thought leaders of the information-sharing
age, essential to the new online world.
 Marydee
Ojala [marydee@xmission.com]
is the editor of ONLINE. Comments? E-mail letters
to the editor to
marydee@xmission.com.
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