October 20, 2008
LII merging with IPL
This was a shock. In revisiting Librarians' Internet Index I noticed that the faceted list of topics for a set of search results was gone. Also that items listed as Recent were very old - 2007 or earlier. Then I discovered the notice on the page, New This Week October 2, 2008
"LII IS NOW ADMINISTERED BY IPLThis week the editors received a press release announcing LII's merger with the Internet Public Library (IPL). IPL is a huge and wonderful Web portal hosted by Drexel University and maintained by a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science. It has solid funding and a paid staff augmented by graduate students in library and information studies programs, allowing it to maintain and improve the database's content and aesthetics with new skills and technical tools.
As you may know, in the last two years LII's funding was cut by 50%. Consequently, we had to reduce the number of sites we add each week, halt improvements to the browsing structure, and generally do less of everything. IPL will give LII's years of work continued life and value and we think they'll do a terrific job. The LII editorial staff and the newsletter will continue through April 30, 2009. We will share news with you as it becomes available; for more information, please contact IPL or Linda Crowe at Califa."
Of interest - "the editors received a press release" - suggesting that this must have been a shock to the librarians involved with LII. Although LII began in California and was funded by that state, in later years there were contributions from other West Coast states and British Columbia.
I am sad about this. LII was a good, general collection of web resources and key articles, well selected, annotated, and categorized. Internet Public Library has always seemed to me to be more directed to school-age students and more specifically for the US, while LII was for adults and had a more global reach. LII has long had a much better navigation system than IPL, although IPL has changed it system to show the categories on search results.
But scholarly / public library directories in North Amercia simply don't attract the funds they need to prosper. The Toronto Virtual Reference Library is another that shows severe signs of neglect. Some public library systems and university libraries might still be keeping guides of their own to web resources, but I'll bet that those too suffer from infrequent updates.
Intute in the UK seems to be the main scholarly directory still thriving.
I hope that the Internet Public Library can build on this, and possibly continue LII as a separate site for LII's users.
Posted by Gwen at October 20, 2008 05:22 PM