What’s really involved if you, say, wanted to write your own search engine? [unalog]
Category: ‘puters
The Trouble With Online – is it us?
Roy Tennant’s article for Library Journal about the pitfalls of trying to use an OPAC to find articles online is now itself online. I love it when people tak about disturbing failures of our profession.
We exert much more control over our library catalogs than we do with article indexes, where we are at the mercy of vendors. Since our catalogs are at least partly in our control (automated system vendors largely respond to market demand, and we control how we catalog our items), we need to find ways to enable users to limit searches to full text online. Users rightly expect this ability. Their not being able to do it easily, or at all, is a disturbing failure of our profession.
what can you use a wiki for?
Wikis were one of the more foreign things I discussed at my talk. It’s easy to point to Wikipedia and say “Look, a collaboratively built encyclopedia!” but it’s more difficult to explain how a librarian could use it in their own libraries. Today Teleread has a post about using a wiki for a book discussion group where groups can collectively annotate a book club web site. I think this is what the National Science Digital Library was hoping for with its Annotation and Review Services wiki but it seems to have suffered from neglect. Here’s a neat little wiki about blogs.
search engines get paid to direct users to for profit sites?
Do you think it’s bad if search engines start receiving revenue for traffic they direct towards other for-profit sites? I’m not entirely sure I understand this article about the Google/Reed Elsevier talks. I also wonder what this means for Scirus which, by its own account, was giving Google a run for its money.
Many scientists post their research on university websites, which can be accessed free of charge. Google directs its users to Reed’s sites, but Reed does not now receive a share of the revenue generated by the traffic. Google has similar revenue-sharing arrangements with other companies, but a deal with Reed would be one of the biggest of its kind. [shelf]
You do remember libraries, don’t you?
What if your search engine really worked like a librarian does?
If only the search engine could stop after a few tries and say, “hey, I’m guessing that you’re looking for something like…” You know, just like any reasonably bright librarian might. (You do remember libraries, don’t you?) Yeah, it’d probably freak some people out, but what if it actually was helpful? [thanks hanan]