by Allen Mullen
Does your patron need a copy of new legislation on discharging wastewater in Texas? How about licensing procedures and forms for private investigators? What about information on immunizations for school-age children? TRAIL, the new Texas Records and Information Locator service, will lead you to the answers. TRAIL is an easy to use, effective means of searching and retrieving Texas state government information hosted on the Internet.
If you have ever looked for any type of government information, you know it can be tedious and frustrating for even the most experienced librarians and Internet searchers. Texas has hundreds of state agencies, regional councils, water authorities, and governing boards to serve many different constituencies. Almost all of these agencies have web servers, and many of them have two or more Internet machines.
Perhaps you know where to begin looking already from attending the Texas State Library and Archives Commission's government information workshops or from past experience. Even then, on the Internet, everything changes so rapidly that bookmarks for key resources you use to help your patrons can be out of date the next time you use them. Agencies reorganize their web sites, shift programs and services, and add new resources at a dazzling rate.
In the pre-Internet days, the state depository library system provided excellent access to all of the publications of Texas state government. Agencies deposited these primarily print resources, catalogers classified them, and they were distributed around the state so that they were available in more than 50 regional depositories. While that service continues today for print publications, agencies are rapidly shifting to the Internet to publish their information. Some agencies are in the process of dropping print publications altogether in favor of electronic formats.
With foresight into changes in publication formats, in its 1997 session, the Texas Legislature amended the Publication Depository Law to address electronic publications. State library staff, in consultation with libraries and staff of other agencies, adopted rules to implement these changes. Out of this vision grew TRAIL.
Texans can now boast of TRAIL as one of the most innovative models of Internet search and retrieval created in this country. More than a handy search tool, TRAIL blends library science principles and methods with cutting edge Internet capabilities. It is a resource that has the precision of a library catalog and functions as intuitively as an Internet search engine. The recommendations and wisdom of Texas librarians played a key role in this effort. TRAIL staff consulted with many library staffs through focus groups, surveys, meetings, and an online discussion group to identify key features of the new service.
How does TRAIL work? On the surface, it is an Internet search engine that allows searching of records created for every electronic state government publication. TRAIL allows searching by keyword, agency, title, subject, or any combination of these access points. While Boolean, phrase searching, and truncation are available for librarians and other sophisticated searchers, a Texan who is familiar with entering a word or two into a commercial search engine can get excellent results as well.
Just as state agencies deposit print publications in the Texas State Library's Publications Depository, now agencies are reporting their new and updated electronic publications through an online web form directly into the TRAIL database. The form is easy to fill out, and the information entered provides key search entry points. While few of the agency staff reporting to TRAIL are librarians, they are effortlessly entering AACR2 agency names, Library of Congress subject headings, and rich descriptions that provide focused search targets as well as highly useful information for searchers when retrieving their search results.
TRAIL also builds on Dublin Core metadata records, which are mandated in state agencies' reports. Dublin Core was developed within the library community as a means of easily describing and searching electronic resources. It is being used internationally by librarians and non-librarians alike as an alternative to MARC and other metadata formats. TRAIL incorporates such library standards in its reporting form and makes it possible for the Texas State Library to provide searching protocols for new publications and keep up with all of the changes that affect the searchability of electronic publications.
Dublin Core also fits nicely into the Z39.50 command search and retrieval protocol. Z39.50, which provides common searching for more than one catalog or database from a single search interface, is being led by the efforts of Texas librarians. The Texas Z39.50 Implementers Group (TZIG) has broken through the complexities and variations that have held back wide-scale implementation of this protocol. Their excellent work ensured that the TRAIL service would be fully Z39.50 compliant, and work is progressing toward integrating TRAIL records with catalog records for print publications. The future of Z39.50 is bright, and TRAIL will continue to build on this powerful tool in concert with other efforts by the Texas library community.
TRAIL also integrates powerful established and new computer capabilities developed outside the library community. It is built on the latest version of Oracle, 8i, developed especially for Internet applications. The primary software used, Blue Angel Technology's MetaStar Enterprise suite, accommodates Dublin Core and Z39.50 as easily as it encompasses practically any other format or search/retrieval protocol. MetaStar Enterprise is built on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that is emerging as a potential successor to HTML. XML provides TRAIL with a path to these future developments.
Librarians and their patrons no longer have to know where to start looking for the information they are seeking. There is no need to sort through page after page of search results of commercial search engines. TRAIL cuts across the vast resources of Texas State government to make finding what you and your patrons need directly and easily. So, don't hesitate to take a TRAIL ride today! J
TRAIL is a service of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in cooperation
with other Texas State agencies. The TRAIL URL is http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/trail
Allen Mullen is the developer of networked services in the Library Resource Sharing Division of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.