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Re: Virtual Reading Rooms: Providing electronic reference to elec tronic records



L.S.,

Our ideas about these issues do not provide all the answers (of course) but
they do provide division of responsibilities and takes the needs of the
interested public in account.

Solutions must take the current situation at archival institutions into
account. This situation is:
- archival institutions are responsible for their own archives,  quality of
description and level of accessability;
- to provide an acceptable level of description and accessability is a
tremendous achievment;
- archival institutions use different solutions from different suppliers to
facilitate the electronic administration and accessability.
- the need of the interested public is cross-departement and
cross-institution; the public wants to know "everything about something".

Any solution(s) that don't adress this situation as "laws of nature" are
bound to fail (a strong utterance, I know).

The state of the art in (information)technology is important. This provides
the framework in which solutions will function.

To start with the information technology. Nobody will argue that the
internet (and with this the intra- and extranets) provides the
infrastructure for information sharing. Also is XML (eXtended Markup
Language) the language in which peers (institution-to-institution and
institution-to-public) communicate.

The internet infrastructure has it's drawbacks. Relatively, communication is
slow and costly compared to local earea networks and full-proof security
against breaking in can not be guaranteed.