Interesting post from the State Library of Kansas. They've cataloged 1,000 Wikipedia articles primarily focused in their niche.
We have cataloged about 1,000 Wikipedia articles analytically at the State Library providing links via the Kansas Library Catalog, WorldCat/OCLC and the State Library’s consortium OPAC, ATLAS. Most all of the Wikipedia articles we’ve cataloged are concerned with Kansas, Kansans or current topics with few resources initially available via standard library resources. We had one of the first records in WorldCat/OCLC linking to information on then-Supreme-Court-nominee, John G. Roberts, as well as an early record on Hurricane Katrina. We followed these entries with other cataloging records accessing more substantive resources, but yes, the initial records were for Wikipedia articles.
Interesting development. I was wondering some time ago if we also should add blog posts to our libraries' assets (catalog?).
The issue here is of course: you can't be sure that these internet articles will be there tomorrow?
Posted by: Lukas Koster | Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 01:29 PM
Yes, the ephemeral nature of Internet resources is always a question for libraries. As time goes on and web resources are consider standard and authoritative this concern will go away. I guess we're just not there yet.
Posted by: Christine Schwartz | Friday, July 03, 2009 at 07:43 AM