The Internet Public Library

The Internet Public Library

Collection Principles: The Internet Public Library (IPL) is a library of publicly available resources found on the web. Initially created out of a class from the Information Science Program at the University of Michigan to see what librarians could do with the internet, the project continues to serve as an educational lab, although now it has a small full-time staff and is hosted by Drexel University. The collection focuses on several primary areas, including arts, humanities, business, education, health, entertainment, science, reference, and blogs, as well as materials for children and teens. Each of these areas is then further broken down into sub-categories with collection guidelines of their own. The IPL���s goal for overall content selection is to ���maintain a balanced and broadly representative collection of websites for information, reference and research.��� Sites are particularly selected for their potential value to the user community.

Object Characteristics: Instead of being a typical digital collection where all of the objects are images or texts and belong to, or are hosted by, one institution, the IPL functions on a different model. The objects found in the IPL are links to other websites. IPL has brought all of these links into one location and classified them by subject. The objects on these websites then come from all over the web and thus have a variety of characteristics. IPL does have a large collection of newspapers, magazines, and books whose text is available on the web, amongst its collection of other sites focused on certain topics.

Metadata: The metadata for each object is relatively non-existent. Each link gets a short descriptive paragraph telling the user what they can expect from the page to which it is linking.

Audience: The intended audience of IPL is similar to that of a regular brick-and-mortar public library. It is targeted at those people who want to know basic information about a topic, or see what is available on a certain subject. It is not aimed for serious research, or scholars looking for in-depth information on a topic, or for someone looking for a specific item. It is a collection best suited for casual browsing.