LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research
Electronic Journal
ISSN 1058-6768
1995 Volume 5 Issue 3-4; December 31.
Quarterly LIBRE5N3 PORAT
________________________________________________
PROJECTS USING THE INTERNET AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA
LIBRARY:
A CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZING A SUBJECT-ORIENTED
RESOURCE GUIDE
AND A CASE STUDY ON THE CLASSICAL
MYTHOLOGY MULTIMEDIA PROJECT
By Lynne Porat and Ora Zehavi, University of Haifa Library
In order to ease use of the Internet, many academic
librarians around the world have begun creating subject-
oriented Internet resource guides. The hope is that
students and faculty will benefit from easier access to
materials in their fields and reduction of time spent
searching for relevant materials. Moreover, these guides
will help keep users up to date with changes in their
fields and will allow them to reap the benefits of the
Internet without the necessity of learning all its
intricacies.
At the University of Haifa Library we have begun
systematically to create home pages - subject-oriented
resource guides - for use by the various Humanitites and
Social Sciences departments at the University. These pages
aim to provide faculty and students with customized access
to information resources and are designed specifically to
suit their research and teaching interests. We have also
developed an internet site containing a multimedia project
for a course on Mythology in Western Art, which provides
access to art images of classical Greek and Roman deities.
Although home pages have been created by librarians around
the world, the University of Haifa Library is the first
library in Israel to undertake such a project. Not only has
the library initiated the systematic creation of home pages
for the various fields of study, it has also created,
together with faculty members, a multimedia project on
Mythology in Western Art not available anywhere else in the
world and currently requested from several universities.
This project presents a first in that the library has
worked jointly with faculty members in the creation of
course material in digital image format. The creation of
home pages and other ease-of-access tools is especially
beneficial to our faculty because the native language is
Hebrew and not English. Therefore, the concentration of
material in single sites on the Internet is particularly
time-saving.
This paper will describe the steps undertaken in the
creation of two projects at the University of Haifa
Library: an English Language and Literature home page and
the electronic project Mythology in Western Art. Both are
accessible from the University of Haifa Library's WWW
Server. The URL for English Language and
Literature is:
http://www-lib.haifa.ac.il/www/subj/english.englit.html
and for Mythology in Western Art:
http://www-lib.haifa.ac.il/www/art/mythology_westart.html)
CASE 1: ORGANIZING A SUBJECT-ORIENTED RESOURCE GUIDE
Methodology
We began this project by contacting the faculty of the
English Language and Literature Department to define
specific needs and interests. The broad aims of the
Department have been outlined as follows: "The Department
of English sponsors research in the fields of Linguistics,
Applied Linguistics, Literary Criticism, and Literary
Theory ... the department also sponsors a program for
creative writing in poetry, non-fiction prose, and fiction"
(_Research Catalogue_, 1994). More specifically, British
and American Drama, Fiction and Poetry, from all periods,
and authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Twain,
Henry James, Spenser, Blake, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and
modern feminist writers, are studied. Once these interests
had been established, we were able to focus our searching
in order to reflect these interests on the home page.
Literature Search
Before beginning work with the Internet, searches were
carried out in _Library Literature_, _LISA_ and _MLA_
indexes on CD-ROM for articles about English Language and
Literature Resources on the Internet. Internet Search
Engines were also used to scan for Electronic articles. In
all, we found one article in _College and Research
Libraries News_ which exactly suited our needs ("Internet
Resources for English and American Literature" by Loss
Pequeno Glazier). Glazier states that an English Literature
home page needs "to be diverse enough to represent
different Internet areas; it must be selective because of
the sheer amount of material available; and its goal
[should be] to be broad enough to recognize both the
presence of interdisciplinary interests ... which offers
resources indispensable to the student or scholar working
in English and American Literature studies" (Glazier,
1994). This provided us with a guideline as to the kinds of
material and home pages that already existed on the
Internet. However, because the author did not state the
criteria he used for selection, and he had included some
material not relevant to research interests at the
University of Haifa's English Department, and because he
focused only on English Literature and not Language, the
article served only as a guideline. Moreover, the speed at
which the updatedness of information changes meant that the
article was already out of date by the time we read it.
Internet Searching
After checking the literature, we began working with the
Internet. We decided to try to locate relevant websites and
other homepages through the WWW key-word search options,
easily accessible by choosing the Internet search option if
you are using WINDOWS and NETSCAPE software at a PC or by
entering the URL if you are using LYNX software on a VAX
work station. The URL is:
http://home.mcom.com/home/i
nternet-search.html. This takes
you into Internet Search Options which includes search
engines such as INFOSEEK, LYCOS, WEBCRAWLER.
Of the several key-word search options available, we
retrieved the most relevant material from INFOSEEK and
YAHOO with the search terms "Literature" and "Resources";
the YAHOO URL is: http://www.yahoo.com/. With YAHOO we were
able to limit our search from the outset only to titles,
rather than searching the contents of a URL. Not only is
this search method very convenient, but it increases the
precision and relevance of the search. Because the search
was more limited we only entered the term "Literature". We
also had some success with WEBCRAWLER. The search takes
longer and produces fewer relevant results. Unless the
search term appears in the title which is displayed, it is
very hard to actually locate the sites with the terms.
Because WEBCRAWLER retrieves from words appearing anywhere,
and not just from the title of the link, but from the
contents of the link, one needs to enter several links
before arriving at the relevant link, if at all.
Every time we found an interesting URL, we saved it in a
personal bookmark file, which provided the skeleton for the
home page.
Resource Selection and Organization
Early on it was evident that reducing the abundance of
relevant material in this field to a manageable quantity
presented the greatest challenge. We decided to make
quality and not quantity the criteria for inclusion. Our
homepage is, therefore, meant to be a selective list and
not a comprehensive one.
Once we had an idea of the types of material available on
the Internet, we decided on the internal organization of
the home page. It would include sections of General
Resources, Author-Specific resources, Electronic Text
Projects, Electronic Journals, Discussion Lists, Reference
Materials and Upcoming Conferences.
General Resources
In order not to duplicate work already done by other
libraries and institutions, we located major English
Literature homepages, and the ones we considered worthwhile
and unique, we put in the general section of the homepage.
These include Rice University's Literature Home Page and
Oxford University's BARD (Bodleian Library) site on
Literature, which are very comprehensive. The disadvantage
of using them is that they have not been customized to suit
the demands of our faculty, and it can be very time-
consuming to search them. Because they are commendable, we
placed them on the general section of the home page, but
nevertheless continued to gather material geared to our
faculty's needs, as previously outlined.
Author-Specific Resources
The next step involved searching and collecting additional
material of a more specific nature. For example, our
faculty research Byron, Shelley and Keats, so we searched
for author-specific sites devoted to their works. In
addition, sites devoted to Shakespeare, Twain and other
relevant figures in English Literature studied at Haifa
were also added. Author-specific sites generally include
details and full-texts of the author's works, biographies,
details of electronic journals devoted to the author, and
more.
Electronic Text Projects
We entered major electronic text projects and archives in
one section. These include the British Poetry Archive -
which consists of "Romantic and Victorian Literature and
Poetry from 1780-1910 published in scholarly editions of
books of poetry" (British Poetry Archive), the Online Book
Initiative - which consists of full-texts such as
conference proceedings, documents, and full-text books, the
Oxford Text Archive - which consists of "electronic
versions of literary works by major authors in several
languages" (Oxford Text Archive) and Project Gutenberg -
which consists of full texts of literary classics.
Discussion Groups
BR>
We also compiled lists of Discussion Groups which aim to
allow a "scholarly level of discourse" (Glazier, 1994) on
English Language, Literature and Linguistics and include
details of how to subscribe. Examples are: MODBRITS - which
concentrates on Modern British and Irish Literature (1895-
1955), AMLIT-L - which discusses various topics in American
Literature, and LITERARY - on general literature topics.
Single-author discussion lists such as the ones on Chaucer
and Shakespeare were also added by creating URLs at the
University of Haifa library server
http://www-lib.haifa.
ac.il/subj/english/author.html.
Electronic Journals
The section of electronic journals required us to be
especially selective. We located five or six scholarly
journals which are directly related to subjects taught
here, and were produced by universities, such as Early
Modern Literary Studies, and Post Modern Culture. In
addition, we gave our Periodicals Department a list of the
addresses of the electronic journals I had entered, so that
they could be entered under the section ELECTRONIC JOURNALS
in the library's homepage, and so that they could be
cataloged in ALEPH, the library's online public access
catalog. Our Library has made a policy decision to catalog
electronic journals in our OPAC.
Reference Tools
Unlike Universities in England and the United States, our
English Department teaches and researches in a language
which is generally not the mother tongue of many students.
With this in mind, and because of the need for basic
reference tools, we created a section of reference
materials. We entered the following in this section:
Webster's English Language Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, a
Synonyms and Acronyms Directory, Book Reviews, Literary
Prizes, the MLA Style Manual for citing printed resources,
and suggestions for citing electronic resources (at present
there is no official literature guide for quoting
electronic sources).
Upcoming Conferences
Finally, we entered a section on Upcoming Conferences and
how to register for them.
Hyper-text Markup Language
Once we had gathered all the addresses, we edited the
bookmark file using HTML. Because this involved learning a
completely new langauge, we read various guides on HTML.
This process was made easier because we had already saved
the URLs in a bookmark file and therefore avoided having to
type them in ourselves; we only had to edit the file.
We decided to organize the headings hierarchically (and not
alphabetically), according to the importance we perceived,
and assigned different names to the links, which we found
to be more appropriate. Within the headings, we organized
the links alphabetically after having chosen the best five
or six sites for each heading. Once the file was edited, we
checked once again that the addresses were typed in
correctly, and that the sites were still functioning.
Because of the time it takes for graphics to be displayed
on the screen, we limited graphics to an icon of
Shakespeare from an existing file. Within the links, there
were, in addition, many graphics. When the file was
completed we transferred it to the publicly available
"Recommended Internet Resources" link in the Library's
homepage.
User Education and Feedback
Finally, we composed a letter to the head of the English
Department informing her of the state of the project and
asking her to inform her colleagues and to reply with
suggestions for improvement. We have had some positive
feedback from the Department, and a request for a
demonstration of how to use the home page. So far we have
demonstrated to one lecturer the use of the author-specific
section. He was particularly pleased with the Keats-Shelley
home page which contained the contents page of the
forthcoming issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and with
the key-word search option when reading a full-text. In the
near future, we plan to give a formal demonstration to all
members of the department who are interested in
participating.
Another lecturer informed me of a Linguistics organization
that can be contacted by E-MAIL, and by using various
commands one can ask all sorts of questions about
linguistics and language, such as E-mail addresses of
colleagues, conferences, and associations. The results are
instantaneous. I put this information on the homepage in
the form of a list and created links for ease of use.
Because I had no URL, I created one within my homepage file
(http://www-lib.haif
a.ac.il/www/subj/english/ling.html).
Another suggestion made was to add profiles of all the
lecturers in the department, with details of their
publications and research interests. We are considering
taking up this idea in the near future.
Conclusion
One of the difficulties of this project was contending with
the speed at which web sites change. Addresses change and
sites cease to exist. We verified many times that every
website still existed at the same location. Another time-
consuming aspect was the selection and evaluation of
material. Our selection criteria were: relevance of the
material to our English department, scope of the site,
uniqueness of the site, ease of use, and reputation of the
institution maintaining the site.
We believe that the home page has fullfilled its aim of
simplifying access to relevant English Language and
Literature material on the Internet. Because it is a
selective list, with specific interests in mind, the user
will have to decide whether to rely on this resource alone,
or to turn to the general internet search options and carry
out his own searches.
Creating subject-oriented resource guides is just one way
for librarians to facilitate user access to the wealth and
breadth of resources available on the Internet. Some
librarians have already created clearinghouses for such
guides such as the Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented
Internet Resource Guides, jointly sponsored by the
University of Michigan's University Library and School of
Information and Library Studies. The URL is:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/chhome.html. It "serves as a
central location for these guides and provides the internet
community with wide access via the most common Internet
tools, including anonymous FTP, Gopher, and World Wide Web.
In addition, WAIS indexing allows full-text searching of
these guides". (Rosenfeld, 1994). Librarians in Israel have
just begun the process of facilitating access to the
Internet; in the future they need to continue to seek ways
of facilitating user access to the Internet in the same way
that they have facilitated access to printed materials in
the past.
CASE 2: CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY USING ELECTRONIC TECHNOLOGY
Introduction_
The Mythology in Western Art Project was developed at the
University of Haifa Library during the academic year 1995
for the course Mythology in Western Art. The project was
designed as auxiliary material for the course and aims to
create a visual textbook of art images of mythological
characters. The textbook consists of images of the main
deities as they have been portrayed in western art from the
eighth century B.C. until modern times. Our objective was
to disseminate visual information from original sources and
art books to as many students as possible. Use of visual
and textual material is an integral part of their course
requirements. The project is disseminated through the World
Wide Web, which has proven to be an ideal way for students
to view and absorb the mythology in western art easily and
quickly. Teaching in this way has also helped students
learn art-related subjects such as the importance of visual
images as well as texts and has improved their computer
skills. Dissemination of art images by computer also aids
in the preservation of the material and allows rare and
precious material, such as manuscripts and museum exhibits,
to be widely available.
>
The project was developed by the course lecturer Dr. Sonia
Klinger and Ora Zehavi, a media librarian. It is the first
joint project of university researchers and librarians, and
could not have been completed without the support of the
library staff and its director.
Description of the Mythology Project
The Mythology project in Western Art can be found in the
University of Haifa library homepage under Art Images. The
URL is http://www-lib.h
aifa.ac.il/www/art/Mythology_westart.html
The opening page of the project presents the objective of
the project and the names of fourteen gods and goddesses.
They are arranged according to the following criteria:
importance, relationship between them, and ease of
teaching. The gods' attributes are defined with a brief
description of the story connected to them. For the first
two gods, Zeus and Hera, quotations from primary sources
were added. Once the student has opened the link of the
desired deity, he can select the images for viewing from
their titles using hypermedia links. These images are
organized in chronological order, from ancient times to
modernity. Such images include vases, paintings, pictures,
sculptures, jewelry, coins and reliefs. A bibliography and
links to other mythology sources in the Internet are also
included
Criteria for Selecting the Course as an Electronic Project
The course Mythology in Western Art was chosen as a
multimedia project because it is open to students from
other departments besides Art History, such as Literature,
History and General Studies, who do not have much
experience searching for art material. The project teaches
them to search for the classical art images, do assignments
and generally become familiar with art on Greek and Roman
gods. It includes textual material and images from art
books, which can be difficult to locate in the library
because they are dispersed among many books from many
periods. The project makes the connection between textual
and visual material, and relieves the student from seeking
the images himself. Moreover, images can be downloaded to
diskettes and viewed outside the library.
Methodology
First, we obtained slides of the fourteen gods that are
taught as part of the course. Next, we searched the
library's catalog for relevant art books where we found the
images. We also found many images by searching in the
catalog of Perseus 1.0, a multimedia CD-ROM of ancient
Greek culture (1). Emphasis was put on the relevance of the
picture to the subject, its quality, its color, and its
sharpness. Then, we provided a definition for each god and
found appropriate quotations from primary sources for two
of the gods (Zeus and Hera). We made sub-divisions
according to the stories connected to each god. Then we
arranged the images in chronological order and by title
(the access point).
After having chosen and located the pictures, we began to
scan them. We arranged the material according to god and in
chronological order. We scanned and improved the quality of
the pictures with the OFOTO (2) program of the Apple One
Scanner. The program edited the image to improve the
quality. OFOTO saved the image in TIFF format. We checked
the quality and relevance of each scanned image a second
time. Then, we transfered the pictures from TIFF (3) format
to GIF (4) format which can be used with NETSCAPE. Finally,
we transfered the pictures to the VAX computer, which is
the WWW server for the library. We also
added a bibliography of the course and links to related
recommended resources on the internet.
Advantages
The program has a number of benefits, some of which are
related to Netscape/Mosaic and the HTML (Hyper Text Markup
Language). One can pass from link to link and from text to
image and quickly, easily and continuously. The information
is clear, short and relevant. Main subjects are followed by
sub-divisions, and then by titles of the images. The images
that we chose are representative of mythology in western
art and are of good quality. Moreover, the program is user-
friendly, which is an important asset because many students
have little previous knowledge of computers. The program
can be used individually or in a group. It can also be
screened in the lecture rooms in the library.
Evaluation
Based on the use of the Mythology project during the spring
semester of 1995 and the results of the final exam, we feel
that the project has been a success. Dr. Klinger reported
that a high percentage of students were successful on the
final exam. Students did especially well in the
identification of the images. This indicates that the
project successfully taught students to view, repeat and
make connections between items and to acquire a thorough
knowledge of visual materials, essential skills for art
studies. Students also became acquainted with the computer
and related skills such as choosing the right drive,
downloading the images to diskettes, and learning about the
Internet. Many students became familiar with the Internet
and learned in more depth about its technicalities, and the
possibility to connect from outside the library. They were
also interested in the process of creating the project. The
fact that so many humanities students have found the
project to be user-friendly and have taken an interest in
the technology behind the project is a sign of its success
for us.
Feedback
The Mythology projects has gained recognition from all
around the world. The following institutions have given us
feedback. Oxford University has recommended the project
on its "Classics at Oxford" and the Global Campus
Information Coordinator in California has entered the
project on its list of recommended sites. Washington
University's Classical Studies Department has described the
program in its web site as follows: "The most complete set
of mythology images on the web at present". The University
of Virginia has included it in their Ancient World Web. The
University of Kentucky in Lexington has entered the project
on its list of recommended courses on Teaching Initiatives
and its list of Art Collections on Classical Subjects.
Scotch College in Adelaide, Australia has also requested
permission to transfer the project to their network and
download images. The editor of the journal _Athena Review_
has requested permission to quote the project in the
journal. At the University of Haifa, the Department of
Archeology, is now using the project for the course
"Mythological Characters" in addition to its use in the
original course in the Department of Art.
Conclusion
We intend to continue improving the Mythology project and
to make other related databases publicly accessible through
the project. We have recently begun work on another joint
project called "Archimedia" which is for the course
Interaction of Ancient and Classic Art for the Winter 1995
semester. The URL is: http://www-lib.haifa.ac
.il/www/art/archimedia.html
This project is
also aimed at Humanities students from all departments and
allows students to view ancient structures and reconstruct
them through specialized software. We will use pictures
already available in the library (slides or in books)
and transfer them to digitized format. We also intend to create
other electronic databases of pictures combined with texts
on different topics.
The mythology project does have some limitations: it is
dependent on a computer network and additional PCs and
software. Because many students still do not own home
computers for viewing the pictures on diskette outside the
campus, it is largely limited to library use. Our immediate
objective is to have more viewing locations on campus.
In the future, students will be able to take advantage of
the library's services from their own homes as well as from
within the library. With so many technological changes
taking place, the librarian plays an important intermediary
role between the material available and the student. In
order to ease this process, joint multimedia projects
between librarians and faculty may well become a future
trend. This kind of cooperation between them is without
doubt, the key to the success of the Mythology project.
Projects such as home page writing and the classical
mythology project mark the beginning of the use of the
Internet by librarians as a medium for transmitting
information and for facilitating access to the mass of
information available on the Internet. In the future,
librarians will surely play a significant role in
organizing the Internet so that the laymen can enjoy and
benefit from it as much as the professional.
NOTES
1. PERSEUS 1.0 - Multimedia CD-ROM on Greek Culture,
produced by Yale and Harvard Universities.
2. OFOTO - Software that activates the Apple One Scanner
3. TIFF (Tag Image Rule Format) - Format for storing
graphical information
4. GIF - (Graphic Interface Format) - Format for storing
graphical information
BIBLIOGRAPHY
University of Haifa _Research Catalogue 1989/1993_. Haifa :
University of Haifa, 1994, 38-43.
Glazier, Loss Pecqueno. "Internet Resources for English and
American Literature." _In College and Research Libraries News_
55:7 (July/August 1994), 417-422.
Rosenfeld, Louis B. "Guides, Clearinghouses, and Value-
Added Repackaging: Some Thoughts on How Libraries Can
Improve the Internet." _ In Reference Services Review_ 22:4
(Winter 1994), 11-16.
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Copyright Lynne Porat and Ora Zehavi 1995.
This article was originally published in
_LIBRES: Library and Information Science
Electronic Journal_ (ISSN 1058-6768) December 31, 1995
Volume 5 Issue 3-4.
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