UM-SI: IPL Background

Internet Public Library

The Internet Public Library (IPL) was founded in winter 1995 to explore the roles of libraries and librarianship in the distributed networked environment of the Internet. Joseph Janes, SI faculty, is IPL's director. From November 1995 to the present, the Kellogg CRISTAL-ED Project has supported IPL development and enhancement which has enabled the library to become a more established entity, given library staff continuity by allowing three crucial participants to continue as paid staff over the last several months, and provided a foundation from which staff have moved to the next level of work.

IPL is a teaching and research library. First, IPL is a library. It is the only public library on, of and for the community of people who live on the Internet. As such, it provides services for that community -- maintaining a collection of network-based ready reference works, answering reference questions, creating stories and contests for children, evaluating and helping people to use popular search engines and catalogs. To date, IPL has been visited approximately one million times by people in over ninety countries, and has been named one of the Top 100 Web Sites by PC Magazine.

IPL has also been a place for people to learn about librarianship, the Internet, and the relationship of the two. It began in a graduate seminar, and continues to provide learning opportunities for professionals-in-training as well as for those working in the field. At the end of 1995, over one hundred people had been involved in the work of the library as seminar members, workshop participants, or volunteers in the Reference Division, and twenty more joined in January 1996.

Further, the Library serves as a venue for research into issues raised by its work. Some recent examples of research projects include an historical review of technological innovation in reference work, development of software to manage distributed collaborative work and create transaction logs for Web servers, development of an archive for the Library's own materials, investigation of the status of languages other than English on the Internet, and development of a real-time interactive reference service in the Library's MOO. Since September 1995, IPL staff have made the following enhancements to the library:

Started WEBInk, a publication for children
Instituted a new division aimed specifically at teenagers and providing information resources on social and personal issues, colleges and universities, sports and entertainment.
Completely revamped the Reading Room which now provides access to one of the largest collections of full texts (over 2,000) and electronic serials (now over 1,000) on the Internet.
Developed "Associations on the Net," a collection of pointers to several hundred World-Wide Web and Internet presences of organizations and associations.
Converted the Ready Reference Collection to a database from a series of static HTML pages; this will enable much quicker addition, editing and weeding of items from the collection, as well as enhanced searching capabilities.
Begun to convert a few introductory documents into French and German to attempt to better introduce our global audience to the services we offer.
Added several new exhibits to the Exhibit Hall, including ancient Egyptian forgeries, "Trains Across America," and "Angry Images," featuring anarchist posters from the University of Michigan's Labadie Collection.
Added "Music History 101," an original site incorporating Real Audio clips of major pieces of Western music over the last several centuries.

In the course of developing the IPL, staff learned several lessons. They learned that people want organization and coherence on the Internet. Staff responded by ensuring that the library's page design and its overall structure help to provide a sense of consistency and help people to navigate and find things easily. Learning that content is very important, IPL staff constantly update and augment library collections to ensure their relevance and utility. Updating and maintenance itself is also very important, and quite different from traditional libraries, since the resources IPL points to could quite easily (and often do) change overnight without our knowledge. Another lesson staff learned was the following: "Don't assume it's out there; don't assume it's not." As the number and variety of resources available on the Net grows, it is increasingly difficult to make assumptions about what kinds of things are available. IPL staff are continually surprised at what they find, and at what (so far) they do not find.

IPL staff are gaining a growing understanding of their community, from their own initial survey completed in March 1996 and from other evidence. The community is largely North American, well-educated and well-off, and users of libraries of all kinds. Half are relatively new to the Internet (access for less than six months), and half are users of the Web for at least five hours a week. Children are not yet a substantial part of our user population, but IPL staff believe that number will only grow and IPL services will be ready when they come.

One of IPL's biggest challenges has been the development and retention of volunteers, especially volunteer librarians answering reference questions. Recruiting is easy, but keeping people interested and excited without regular personal contact is much harder. IPL staff have attempted, through a regular electronic mail newsletter and t-shirt prizes, to create a greater sense of community and belonging amongst our volunteers, but this still remains a problem.

IPL staff have also yet to figure out effective ways to serve members of the Internet community whose first or primary language is not English. Initial attempts, translating our welcome documents into French and German, were clearly only tiny beginning steps, but the question of international development remains an important but unsolved one.

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