The Personal Virtual Library

Looking for "library" in the usual search engines of the World Wide Web gives: "Infoseek found 3,593,126 pages containing the word library" and it nicely proposes: "Search only within these 3,59 3,126 pages ?" "Yahoo! Found 1299 categories and 8669 sites for library" "LycOs: 1-10 von 512354 relevanten Ergebnissen" "AltaVista: About 14830527 documents match your query" and at the botto m: "Word count: library: 15466897" ! Excite: Top 10 matches and it does not say how many can be browsed... "Library" on the World Wide Web is really popular. At least fiveteen million pages ar e supposed to contain this word. Half of them may have disappeared by now but one more hit will be added once the search robots will have indexed this document ! The notion of Personal Library i s a modest attempt, in a small environment like a library, to give poor users lost in cyber-libraries the opportunity to keep their own private little shelves - virtually. In this paper, we will l ook at the usual functionalities of library systems before focusing on the description of the Personal Virtual Library (PVL). We will finally explain how it can easily be implemented on the top of a ny library system.