Internet Public Library scores a perfect 10

When three dozen School of Information (SI) students set out to build "the first public library of the Internet" at U-M in 1995, they wondered if anyone would notice.

(Image by Steve Cotterill)

Ten years and hundreds of millions of mouse clicks later, it is clear that their fears were unfounded. The IPL, as it's now known familiarly, serves more than seven million patron visits a year from virtually every country on the planet. It has grown into both an unparalleled resource for students, researchers and librarians, and a premier training ground for tomorrow's digital librarians.

To celebrate this milestone, IPL (http://ipl.org) is hosting an "open house" on March 17, but of course, it too will be virtual.

"During our anniversary celebration," says Associate Professor Maurita Holland, executive director of the IPL, "patrons can leave us online messages about what the IPL has meant to them, view some videos of past IPL staff, and read some of the most unusual reference questions we have received."

IPL's founding students wanted to know if they could transfer the model of a bricks-and-mortar public library to the fledgling World Wide Web. The IPL since has served as a prototype for thousands of digital libraries around the world.

During the years, SI students have built a vast storehouse of carefully selected online resources for children and adults. Some "exhibits," such as the popular Presidents of the United States, are used daily by K-12 students and teachers.

SI offers a course devoted to operating and improving the IPL that serves as a learning and research laboratory for digital librarianship. SI students add to the IPL collections, answer reference questions from all over the world, and train professional librarians on how to build digital collections.

Master's students studying librarianship at SI are the backbone of the IPL, but others from the school's specializations in archives, human-computer interaction, and information economics play important roles as well.

"The fact that the IPL has drawn from such a cross-section of our students speaks to the nature of today's librarianship itself," Holland says. "Each student brings an important element to the IPL. Librarians today need to know how an entire library operates, and our students pick up this kind of management experience by working with the IPL."

Holland adds, "The IPL is a rich resource for research in virtual information seeking and information service. It has generated hundreds of articles and scholarly works that further our knowledge in this dynamic, emerging field."

Many former IPL staff members are working in all aspects of librarianship today. Josie Parker, director of the Ann Arbor District Library, says her IPL experience played a fundamental part in developing her career. "It has taken a decade to hone the skills, but the experience of managing resources well, listening to users and negotiating governance were all present in my first public library job, the Internet Public Library," she says.

The IPL came about as part of a course project at SI with then-instructor Joseph Janes, now of the University of Washington. Students gathered informally on a Saturday morning in January 1995 to discuss what they could create during the semester. The digital library idea took hold and students assigned tasks to each other. Janes had his doubts at the time, but by the end of the first year, a million users from more than 100 countries had visited.

By the third year, IPL volunteer librarians and staff knew they were on to something. The IPL had answered more than 5,000 reference questions from around the world, with such positive results that IPL became the "library of last resort" for other librarians with "stumper" questions.