(I mean archived websites)
I was recently tasked with setting policy for description of Web collections at the University of Miami Libraries.
This task spawned a great deal of mental masturbation: Web collections force us to re-think our assumptions about the nature of a collection and its use cases. They force us to be more conscientious about description.
In the interest of professional discourse, here’s a re-cap of my (and my colleagues’) thought process re: description of Web collections.
#1. What are we describing?
The collections? The websites? Individual pages or publications on the sites we archive? All of these were suggested as potentially appropriate points of access.
I had two questions: 1) How can we best serve users? 2) How can we align description of Web collections with intellectual control for our other collections?
After informally polling our user-base and professional contacts, we determined that known-item searches (e.g., I want…
