It is obviously a high priority area for research and study. In light of this trend, at Bond University [HREF 2], we have developed a Tourism Law program [HREF3]which is believed to be among the first of its kind in the world. While the courses focus on law, the approach is multidisciplinary in recognition of the close relationship between policy, law and management in tourism.
Therefore it seemed logical, as the Web began to provide a relatively convenient mechanism for linking information, to examine the possibility of providing a comprehensive subject guide [HREF 4] to this area with an emphasis on Australian content. And that's where the fun began!
As I keyed in "tourism" and "law" using a variety of Web search tools, I was surprised at the relatively little amount of material I was able to retrieve. In desperation I searched the University's OPAC for books in this area. And I discovered that not infrequently monographs written on the subject tend to group tourism with travel and hospitality.
Anolik (1988) mentions "travel law" as a relatively new area to the legal profession and notes that the travel industry was predicted to be the number one service industry within the United States in the 1990s . He admits amazement that so little has been written on this topic.
Pengilley (1990) sheds some light on the area:
"Except in the case of specific regulatory legislation such as the licensing of travel agents, for example, there is no such thing as the law of tourism and travel. . . The law speaks in terms of general principle and one has to adapt such general principle to specific fact situations in the travel and tourism industry. There is a law of competition. There is a law of contract. There is a law of consumer protection. All apply to the travel and tourism industry."
Atherton (1994) explains that the tourism "product"--as he calls it-- is a mixture of many components, all of which are stand-alone units by themselves! Thus tourism law is the epitome of an interdisciplinary field.
As the "author" of a proposed subject resource, my first priority was to develop a strategy to identify appropriate resources within all these parameters. My role was to act as a filter for useful information. I would like to share with you some of the key components of that exercise.
"tourism denotes the temporary, short term movement of people to destinations outside the places where they normally live and work and their activities during their stay at these destinations."
Atherton (1993) has highlighted four key elements:
Other groupings might have topics 9-24 comprising hospitality or possibly topics 1-8 comprising travel and 9-30 comprising tourism policy and development.
Some of the various Web search tools simply retrieve items with no clue as to where the match was made. Others such as Harvest [HREF 5] provide the context for the match: partial text, title, url reference, and/or keyword. So the choice of appropriate search tool is very important. Since my aim, as previously stated, was to act as a filter, I needed to be able to judge the relevance of the retrieved item.
I then had to decide what the scope of the proposed subject guide would be. Did I want to point to everything I could find on tourism and law in their own right and then let the user determine which--if any--items dealt with these areas as co-existing concepts? Or would I attempt to sift through what I retrieved and point only to those items which dealt specifically with these two topics?
Going back to the concept of the filter, the ideal was the sifting approach. There are a number of sites which currently offer "comprehensive" "complete" (fill-in-the-blank) coverage on either travel and tourism or on law. However, I think that you would agree that the average academic, professional or business person is far too busy to attempt to wade through all that in the hope of finding relevant material.
What has happened in reality is a composite of both approaches. I took as my starting point or structure the aforementioned principles of tourism law. I have then proceeded to use a number of search tools to retrieve legal aspects of each topic, e.g. hospitality and law or marinas and law. Since there are 30 topics, it is a time-consuming exercise, and is, in fact, still in process. In some cases, I have found general material on a topic but no mention of legal aspects. So I have pointed to that material as a first step.
For this project to even commence, I had to seek specialist advice since I had no training in tourism law as a whole or its components. As a result the project has evolved into a joint venture between myself (librarian) and Trevor Atherton (law academic). This has meant access to an informal collegial network to which I would not normally have access. One of the possible outcomes may be the mounting on institutional web servers of specific resources in this area of which many interested researchers may not be aware, thereby contributing to the resource guide which we are creating.
As a librarian I have long appreciated the work which colleagues have done in creating traditional subject-based resource guides. Rosenfeld (1994) refers to this as "value-added repackaging". The tourism law project is an example of applying this construct in the Internet environment. So I had to decide whether I wished to provide evaluative descriptions of content and quality. Given the fact that I was working in such a relatively new area, I felt that this was a critical component of the exercise.
As I have had to deal with these issues in order to develop a working strategy, I have realized that inherently my underlying structure will need to be changed. While hypertext creates links which transcend traditional structures, we still need to provide users with some broad outline which helps them to deal with what they see on a screen, especially when confronted with a resource guide. From my own experience, I am already beginning to re-think my current approach, including the level of annotation. However, that notwithstanding, it was still necessary for me to identify a base from which to start. If we view resource guides as continually evolving, then redefining our basic constructs should not be an onerous task.
There are, of course, additional considerations such as copyright; however, these have been dealt with in depth by other Conference participants.
Trevor Atherton (1993) "Tourism Law: the last resort or the next frontier?", paper presented to Global Action to Global Challenge Conference, Bali, Indonesia, 4-6 October.
Trevor Atherton (1994) "Principles of Tourism Law: course information" Bond University, School of Law, p. 6.
Geoffrey H. Lipman (1993) in a speech delivered to the 10th General Assembly of the World Tourism Organisation, Bali, Indonesia, 7 October.
Warren Pengilley (1990) "The Law of Travel and Tourism" Bond Junction, NSW, Blackstone Press, p. 115.
Louis B. Rosenfeld (Winter 1994) "Guides, Clearinghouses, and Value-Added Repackaging: some thoughts on how librarians can improve the Internet", Reference Services Review, pp. 11-16.
AusWeb95 The First Australian WorldWideWeb Conference