Chat Room-Policy Discussion

If you haven't updated your materials selection policy (hereafter called MSP) to include Net resources, you should do so now. Revising your MSP will force you to think harder about exactly what you are doing--and what you should be doing--with online resources. I've asked former children's librarian Sharon Morris to serve as our consultant this month. Morris is Kid's Catalog product manager for the CARL Corporation, and in that role she has compiled a database of several thousand Web sites, broken into topics, for the Kid's Catalog. In compiling that database, she's created an MSP that guides her and her staff, as well as advises Kid's Catalog users. She's thought long and hard about how and why librarians select Web sites for young people's use.

Here are the questions we both considered:

Do the unique qualities of Net resources require you to establish a separate "Internet materials" section in your policy? Or should you include them with books, videos, and other "hard copy" materials? "Since the resources a library points to on the Web are not 'owned' by the library and not 'static' in the same way a library collection is," says Morris, "the policy does need to be somewhat different." I'm concerned, however, that for those very reasons, librarians might not take selecting Web sites as seriously as they do selecting other materials. They should.

How can an MSP help you clarify your vision of what sites to add to your library's collection, and help you defend sites when they're challenged? Morris says school and public librarians "need to be clear on the goal of their online collection. Is it to provide a pointer to online games for children to play? Is it to enhance and supplement their print collection? Is it to guide children in learning how to research online? Once they have the goal, the specifics follow." You need to be clear and logical, so non-librarians can understand why you select items, even if they don't agree with you. School librarians may want to add some education-related questions, too: What skills do you aim to encourage in the students using the list? How do the sites you select support the curriculum goals for all the grades and ability levels you serve?

What criteria do you use for evaluating the sites in your collection? Morris and I agree that it's important to list those criteria clearly. A good sample to start from when developing your MSP is the list of criteria developed in 1997 for the ALA 700+ Great Sites list, at www.ala.org/parentspage/greatsites/criteria.html. There are four sets of criteria--covering authorship, purpose, design, and content--and all are as relevant now as they were four years ago.

What about including commercial sites? The kudzu-like growth of dot-com sites makes a lot of people who select sites uneasy. Morris says, "I would avoid commercial sites except in rare circumstances." On the other hand, I think that there are plenty of good ones. The 700+ Great Sites criteria states simply, "Advertising should not overshadow the content." I believe that's an excellent rule of thumb for selection. Nationalgeographic.com contains some of the finest education topic sites I've seen, and many children's publishers have worthwhile sites on their authors and the books they publish.

Your MSP should acknowledge the fluid nature of the Web. A site that's excellent today may be sold to someone else with very different goals tomorrow. Links and content on many sites change spasmodically. Although it's a good idea to say in your policy that the library's not responsible for sites that are linked to the sites you've selected, you should check them anyway. Also, always state in your MSP that the library will review the sites regularly, cull dead or changed links, and add new ones--and be prepared to do that.

Sharon Morris believes that librarians need to integrate Web sites into their collections "more than they do now. I think this is critical to the future success of libraries." I agree.