Building and maintaining a library Gopher: traditional skills applied to emerging resources

Gopher software has emerged rapidly as a powerful tool for providing library users with organized access to Internet resources. Building and maintaining Gophers is one way in which librarians' traditional knowledge and skills are being applied in a nontraditional area. In March 1992, the University of Michigan's ULibrary Gopher was created, mainly as a means of providing access to U.S. Census data and the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Bulletin Board. In an effort to broaden the scope of the Gopher, librarians were asked to submit ideas for new resources to access. The result was the ULibrary Gopher Working Group, a team of eighteen librarians from six libraries on campus. The Alfred Taubman Medical Library staff drafted a menu design for life sciences resources and received basic UNIX training. In March 1993, the life sciences section of ULibrary became fully operational and now is maintained by the Taubman staff. This paper describes the history of the ULibrary Gopher and the working group, the creation and ongoing maintenance of the life sciences area of the Gopher, staffing issues, and the relationship of Gopher building to traditional collection development.