By Ellen Fox

Many libraries have collections of newspaper clippings, pamphlets, magazine articles, government brochures and other odds and ends on particular subjects of local interest. If your library has few financial resources but a little extra staff time (or perhaps some community volunteers), you can make your vertical file available and searchable on the web at little cost.

The first step, of course, is determining if there are any copyright issues associated with your local collection. That should certainly be a priority before you reproduce any material. Local newspapers may be willing to grant permission to reprint articles with the appropriate attribution. Review your vertical file and see what steps you can take.

Next, you must convert the articles to HTML format. Many people think scanning is the fastest way to accomplish this, but often it takes more time to scan than to rekey the material. Scanners have a notoriously difficult time accurately scanning and converting newspaper and magazine fonts, especially since font face and size may change from one paragraph to the next. Once scanned, the electronic version must be carefully edited, since no Optical Character Resolution (OCR) software has a 100 percent accuracy rate. Then HTML tags must be added. In the end, it often makes more sense to put volunteers to work at a basic HTML editor to re-enter the text along with the HTML codes.

If you don't need every word of the article indexed, you can scan the article and save it as an image. Then you can use the information in the META tags as your indexing terms.

Next, someone on the cataloging staff (or anyone who has facility with indexing) should sit down with each article and identify keywords that would be helpful to searchers. Put the keywords in the META tags at the start of the article. These META tags will not be visible to users of the web site, but are searchable and will increase the relevancy of search retrievals. For example, a pamphlet describing local bike trails might have a keyword tag like this: <META name = "keywords" content = "bike trails, bicycle trails, commuting by bike, recreation">. For a fuller overview of META tags, visit the web site WDVL.com/Authoring /HTML/Head/Meta/.

After the files are loaded on your web server, add a search engine to your site -- preferably one that will give special relevance or weight to META tags. (See "New BCR Search Engine Provides Users with More Functional Web Site" in the October 1998 issue of Action for Libraries). If you run a Windows NT server with the Internet Information Server as your web server, keyword searching is built in. Just index your new files and make them available. All the words in the files will be searchable, and you've provided assistance to your patrons by adding indexing terms that will help them locate what they need. As you add new files to your site, you will want to run the indexing software frequently to make sure searchers are getting the most up-to-date information.

This solution to putting your vertical file material on the web isn't quite as clean and elegant as some of the proprietary systems allow, but it is doable by anyone who has the time and energy to undertake the project.