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8 Bus. Info. Alert 1 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/busiale8 and id is 1 raw text is: Risk or Reward: Setting Your Organization's Internet Policy by Cynthia Shockley L ast year Internet use doubled, as it has every year since 1988. At the same time, use of the Internet's graphical interface, the World Wide Web, grew almost twenty-fold. No one knows exactly how many people are out there creat- ing, maintaining, and using Internet sites, but an October 1994 estimate by Internet analyst John Quartermain puts the number at 13.5 million. One of the leading search sites, Lycos, ran 30 million searches in October 1995. Estimates are that this number will grow to 100 million searches per month byJune 1996. Lycos has cataloged more than 9.3 million Internet site addresses, called URLs. Given this experience, Lycos began a television campaign in November 1995 advertising itself as The Catalog of the Internet. Internet content-everything from the text of classical literature to underground music-is exploding even more spectacularly. Without any prospect of profit, thousands of individuals have put millions of pages online-everything from complete libraries of technical information to day-by- day personal diaries. How does this dynamic growth impact the library community? Have you been asked by your organization to develop Internet policies and procedures? Are you doing the train- Di Thas assUe ing for your organization? Are you a Webmaster or on the Webmaster's team? When such a question was posed on the BUSLIB listserv, some interesting dialog took place. You really hit a hot but- ton with that question replied a student enrolled in an MLS program. The one thing that the faculty has attempted to drill into our heads is that librarians cannot sit and wait for someone to ask their opinions! We have to get in there and form policy and procedures or someday we will wake up and our jobs will be gone! The MIS department (as well as others) will be all too happy to take over if we don't insist that we be included right from the beginning! As Barbara Beverly, Director of Library Services for the New York State Department of Economic Development, observed, I intend to promote library access as much as pos- sible since we are being seen as the place to go . . . however, MIS and other departments don't want to provide much Internet access because they see it as a big time waster (which it can be). But how else can people learn? How can librarians step into the breach? How aggressive should librarians be in claiming the Internet as their domain? The Internet is an information utility and, continued on page 4 Risk or Reward.................................1 From the Editor ..................... ............2 News and Trends................................3 New Sources..................................6 Calendar ........................... ............ 12 Review Finder .....................................1 2 Vendors ....................... ..............1 2 WtSMk=tal

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