In the last issue of TSLL, Anna Belle Leiserson wrote in this column encouraging technical services librarians to become involved in creating Web sites. I thought I would take this opportunity to give an example of her theory in practice.

At the time, it seemed like a small step. In early 1998, the Southern Illinois University School of Law Library assumed responsibility for all aspects of Web administration for the SIU School of Law, Law Library and the seven legal clinics of the School of Law. The charge for coordinating Web development was written into my job description as Systems/Technical Services Librarian. Production procedures for the SIU School of Law community's Web sites have been or will be integrated into Technical Services.

Creating Web sites in and of itself may seem like a small but valuable task, one extra line tacked onto a job description already burdened by the "Other Duties as Assigned" clause. It was my strong belief from the beginning, however, that this was not only an opportunity to expand the role of Technical Services within the library and the law school, but an educational opportunity for our technical services staff as well.

In order to meet and exceed this educational goal, Web sites we created became working laboratories for the training of technical services staff. Learning HTML was just the beginning. Our staff meetings have become training sessions for image and text scanning, as well as discussions of markup languages, their relationship with technical services, and ways of integrating our Web based catalog with our Web site to form a more coherent approach to accessing information. In each case, these new skills were not seen as something separate but rather as new tools for enhancing the service component of Technical Services.

In the specific case of metadata, we create Dublin Core headers for every Web page we develop. Metadata creation exists, for us, as a natural part of the Web development process. The Dublin Core (or TEI, EAD, RDF, etc.) are additional tools at our disposal with which we apply principles of description and access.

To provide this structure and standardization we implemented two things. Catalogers create the metadata from a template we have devised and we employ AACR2 as syntax for the header content. The process mirrors our print workflow. As new Web pages are created or acquired, a template is added to the header of the page. Since the bulk of the information the header contains is standard, many of the fields are already filled. A cataloger then takes the page and finishes off the Dublin Core header by modifying any existing data and adding new information as needed.

As we build Web sites for the school and for the library, we integrate canned searches against our catalog for specific topics related to the department or clinic involved. We also use them to highlight aspects of our collection. This provides additional access points for the catalog and keeps it from getting lost amidst the clutter of the Internet. It also emphasizes that a blend of print, electronic, microform and Internet sources results in the best research strategy by showing that everything is not on the Web.

We have been in production for over a year now and are already seeing benefits. Adding the skill of producing and publishing materials in electronic formats as well as practical production considerations to the repertoire of Technical Services has proved very rewarding not only on an individual level, but to the library as a whole. I believe this reaffirms Anna Belle's assertion that technical services librarians are naturals for building Web sites and I hope that we can explore the practical side of doing this in future columns. Until then, feel free to join us up on the soapbox.

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