By the time you've finished reading this interview with Peter Scott, you'll have had to ask yourself, "When does he sleep?"

Peter is a true Internet pioneer and, apparently, has not slept for a long time. If you were around in the preWeb days of Internet usage, you most likely remember a tool called Hytelnet. It allowed you to easily connect to remote computers, often library catalogs, by simply clicking and invoking the proper command (telnet). Peter Scott created this tool.

Since then, Peter, as you will read, has been involved in many projects, including the creation and maintenance of the indispensable Libdex, a Web site that compiles and organizes links to over 17,000 library Web sites and OPACs. In recent months, Peter has become a leading expert and speaker on the use of Weblogs in the library setting.

Peter and I have conversed via email for several years. We have only met in person once. When we did meet at Internet Librarian 2001, we chatted about many things, including a few topics not connected to the information profession. In fact, Peter and I chatted popular music, particularly British pop. Oh yes, I almost forgot, Peter has some first hand knowledge on this subject too. Read on.

I interviewed Peter via e-mail in early February 2002.

Price: Peter, tell the readers of Searcher about yourself and your background.

PS: I was born on Valentine's Day in 1947 in London, England, during the worst blizzard in recorded history! Postwar England was a pretty bleak place, and education wasn't seen as particularly important. We were required to work in factories, producing goods which are now made in the Third World. However, some of my happiest times were spent making plastic ducks and hairbrushes! I loved the camaraderie of the factory-floor ...the women workers with their head-scarves, and the male bosses with their pencil-thin moustaches and Bryl-creamed hair.

It was also during my factory life that I formed my first band in 1964 with some co-workers. Like most 17year-olds at that time, we scrounged up some money to buy very basic equipment, and played the blues. I was the singer and harmonica player and still play a little today. Those were exciting times. I regularly attended shows featuring the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and all the other great bands of the British 1960s. The settings were intimate, the musicians approachable, and the people bizarre!

I also loved live theatre and was fortunate enough to see great plays by Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Samuel Beckett, and so on. During that time, I got a job in the Cambridge University Press warehouse in London. It was a great experience, and I met many of the authors when they came to the office to collect their royalty cheques. I moved on to Dillon's University Bookshop and eventually became the manager of the mail-order department, where I had daily contact with librarians and publishers from all over the world. After a return to school, Newbattle Abbey College in Scotland, to finish high school, I earned a degree in Humanities at Middlesex Polytechnic. My final job, before moving to Canada in 1976, was at the civil engineering library of Imperial College, London.

Price: Speaking of music and playing the harmonica, what can you tell us about the Juno Awards?

PS: Juno Awards are presented by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences for excellence in music. I was fortunate enough to have a song of mine, "TV Preacher," included on the album Saturday Night Blues, which won "Best Roots and Traditional Music Album" in 1992.

Price: Do you have any specific memories of the librarians you worked with? Were you always intrigued with information and books? Were you a person who liked going to the library?

PS: I particularly remember Marjorie Carter, the librarian at Imperial College in London. She taught me so much about how libraries operate. She was patient, kind, and always put the needs of users first. I love books and spent many happy hours at the local public library in Walthamstow, the town in which I grew up. It was there that I discovered George Orwell, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and all the other great writers. I was also the "book monitor" at primary school. It was my job to hand out the new textbooks to students. I loved the smell, the feel, the "essence" of the books.

Price: So, you didn't take a degree in library science?

PS: No. Although I was offered a place at City University in London to study for a Ph.D. in the fledgling subject of Information Science, I stupidly turned it down.

Price: Why was it stupid?

PS: Well for one thing the tuition was free. But also, I've had to deal with issues of credibility...the "how can you, as a non-librarian, know anything about libraries?" I remember a talk I gave at Acquisitions 90 in St Louis. I suggested that it might be a nice gesture for the librarian to pay for lunch when the vendor representative showed up, just to thank them for all the services they provide. This didn't go down very well with some librarians and a hot debate ensued! I was almost physically attacked by one very irate librarian who suggested that I was a lacky for the vendors!

Price: Why did you decide to leave London for Saskatchewan? Was adjusting from life in the U.K. difficult?

PS: I was beginning to see a major political shift. Margaret Thatcher was ready to take over the country and I wanted no part of her agenda. Also, living in London was getting pretty tough. Salaries weren't high and I wanted some comfort. My wife is from Saskatoon, so we decided to give it a shot. I particularly admired the provincial government in Saskatchewan at the time, which provided Medicare and other publicly funded services. It was also nice to receive a substantial increase in pay!

Price: What was your first job at the University of Saskatchewan? When was this?

PS: 1976. I worked in the cataloguing department, editing MARC copy. The library had a home-grown automated system - one of the first in the world - and I was responsible for adding call numbers and preparing editing sheets for someone else to key punch the changes into the system. It was pretty tedious and mind-numbing work, reminding me of my early conveyer-belt work in factories! I then moved on to become Order Unit manager, responsible for purchasing material and maintaining the book and serials budgets. I enjoyed this tremendously because it gave me an opportunity to reconnect with old booktrade colleagues. I particularly enjoyed negotiating services with the library suppliers, and the free lunches weren't bad either.

Price: What is your current job at the University?

PS: I am the Internet Projects manager, which means I spend a lot of time helping staff with Web development and e-mail problems. We have recently developed a database of e-journals. I spend most of my time keeping it current and dealing with all the associated problems of that medium. Ejournals can be immensely frustrating, for both myself and the users. So many publishers just don't "get it." I recently set up a discussion list for librarians called "e-journal access gripes." The name speaks for itself....

Price: When did you created Hytelnet. How did it come about?

PS: In the late 1980s I developed an interest in hypertext, the nonlinear presentation of information. We used VMS mail in the library, but whenever anyone needed help understanding a particular command, they would have to shut down the program, run the help screens, then re-open mail. That seemed pretty ridiculous, so I decided to capture all the help information, chop it up into finite pieces of linked information, and present it with a memory-resident DOS program, which ran independently. So, when someone needed to find a command, they would just run the program without interrupting their mail work. I called it HYMAIL.

I created a few more similar resources, which have long ceased to be useful! In 1990 1 started to see references to libraries which were making their catalogs available to the world via telnet. A couple of people were compiling lists of such libraries, but I thought that it might to be useful to create a hypertext directory of these, similar to HYMAIL. So, while recovering from a heart problem - 3 months off work - I started the onerous task of compiling data. Once everything was ready, I announced the resource to the world and was utterly amazed at the positive comments I received. Hytelnet, by the way, stands for Hypertext Guide to Telnet Resources.

Because of the success of Hytelnet, I started to receive invitations to speak at library conferences about the work. I also received e-mail from Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, asking if it was OK to use my data for his first Web browser. This was flattering, but I didn't have a clue what he was talking about!

Price: Did you enjoy those early conference presentations?

PS: Yes, very much, and I still do. I have met many interesting librarians who have become my "true" colleagues ...Roy Tennant, Jane Dysart, Scott Brandt, to name a few.

Price: Did you need to have any programming knowledge to do these early projects?

PS: No, I know nothing about programming. I wish I did. It would make my life a lot easier. Luckily, I have people I can call on when I need some code whipped up. I've always seen myself as "the content guy" and rely on others to come up with the programming.

Price: People are often intimidated into trying "new things." You are apparently not. Any suggestions for those people who are?

PS: Just jump in. Download some freeware. Make graphics online. Talk to the geeks with the strange haircuts. Embrace all areas of the Internet. Try out some e-commerce. See how things work. Look for connections. Keep an open mind. Even though librarians gained access to the Internet early on, they must realize that it's not just theirs. It's for everybody. And yes, we will have to put up with "shooting the monkey" for some time.

Price: When and where did you first see the Web in operation? What were your thoughts?

PS: Actually I first started to see the Web when I was maintaining Hytelnet. I used to index sites that were running Web services via telnet. I spent hours testing Tim Berners-Lee's line-mode browser for him. It was awful, but I could certainly see the potential. As the browsers developed, I thought that the Web was just FTP with pictures. But it soon became clear that the Web would change everything about information and communication.

Price: And today? What Web resources, search tools and sites "wow" you these days? Is Google the answer to everyone's searching problems?

PS: I love Google and use it all the time. But there are others as well. I particularly like AlITheWeb. I also make a point of checking what's new on Yahoo! every day. It's just something I've always done. I have to say that I am "wowed" each minute I am using the Internet. There is so much happening in all areas that it's difficult to isolate anything in particular. One thing that's always uppermost in my mind is that it's people who are creating the resources. They don't just show up. I know firsthand what's involved and greatly admire people who are on the creative edge.

Price: When did you replace Hytelnet with webCATS?

PS: It wasn't so much a replacement as a complement. webCATS, October 1996, listed Web-based OPACs, and was a full-blown Web resource. It, too, became very popular with librarians, but I decided that it might be more useful to also include links to library home pages. So Libdex was born in October 2000. It also includes links to Friends of the Library pages. FOLs are very helpful to libraries when it comes to fund-raising and support. I hadn't come across such an index, so I decided to build one into Libdex. I also wanted to promote libraries, which were running e-commerce affiliations.

Price: Does maintaining Libdex take up a lot of your time?

PS: Only when I let it! There are around 17,600 libraries listed, and I rely on the libraries themselves to keep their information up-to-date. I also have librarians regularly checking the data for general errors. Luckily for me, so many librarians can't stand incorrect information!

Price:WhatotherWeb-based sources do you maintain?

PS: I've been listing home pages of publishers from day one of the Web. In fact, many publishers had their data available via telnet. It wasn't pretty. I also indexed freenets and community networks. However, many of those are shutting down, now that Web space is so cheaply available.

Price: What about Weblogs?

PS: Ah, yes.. Weblogs, blogs, call them what you will...personal journals, diaries, link pages...they're all the rage. The interesting thing is that they have been around in some form for years. What's different is the software used to create them and the willingness of people to spend more than a little time maintaining them. What's interesting to me is how librarians are jumping in to create useful, timely, and relevant information that is shared freely.

I maintain a list of library Weblogs, and it makes for fascinating reading. Some of the Weblogs are run by individual librarians, others are mandated by a library itself. I see this as a major growth area of the Web, and I predict that just about every library will have a Weblog of some kind in the very near future. What's also interesting, and it mirrors to some extent libraries being involved in the "dark" world of e-commerce, is that libraries are working with the 16-year-old PHP/mySQL programmers to collaborate on useful software. Look for some truly neat things in the next year.

Price: Have you thought about retiring?

PS: Yes, from my University job. I will continue to be interested in and fascinated by the Internet and its various potentials. In my spare time, I am a consultant with Northern Lights Internet Solutions, a local IT company. All my directories are housed with them and they provide major support. I have a number of new directories in the works. All I need is the time to maintain them and retirement will give me that time. I don't play golf... Price: A popular British radio program is Desert Island Discs, where people share the recordings they would want to have if they were alone. Can you name 10 Web-based resources that you feel this strongly about as far as Web-based research oriented or information gathering sites?

PS: Just 10? Since my interest are so varied, I would not only include the Googles, Yahoo!s, and other search engines, but also the directories of freeware, like http:/ /www.NoNags.com and http://www.SourceForce.net, http:ll www.weblogs.com to see what's happening in the blogging world, and, of course, some e-mail software for communicating with my colleagues. They are the greatest resource.

Price: Any final thoughts?

PS: Yes. I really need some sleep....