Bates Marcia J. "Off-Line Networks" The New Yorker, p.24, March 18, 2007

[Eugene Garfield]

E-mail: mjbates at ucla.edu

AUTHOR : Marcia Bates

TITLE  : OFF-LINE NETWORKS

SOURCE :  The  New Yorker, p. 24, March 18, 2007.

FULL TEXT appears below with permission from  the author:


Jeffrey Toobin reports that Google characterizes its impressive index-the-
libraries project as "the equivalent of a giant library card catalogue" 
("Google's Moon Shot," February 5, 2007 - 
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/05/070205fa_fact_toobin ). But 
library catalogues index only whole books and, occasionally, chapter  
headings, never the full text.  Google's project is more like a giant 
combined back-of-the-book index, which constitutes vastly more detailed 
indexing than a library catalogue does. Dan Clancy, Google's chief engineer 
on the project, addresses the challenge of  making books searchable by 
saying, "Books are not part of a network" But books are already part of a 
network  -- the references to other books and articles that most nonfiction 
books cite. The lSI Web of Knowledge citation indexes, to which most large 
academic libraries subscribe, trace this network.  Drawing from several 
thousand journals, the indexes identify citation linkages between those 
journal articles and all other materials cited in the journals, including, 
of course, books.

Address :  Marcia  Bates, Professor Emerita, Information Studies U.C.LA. 
Los Angeles, Calif
Department of Information Studies
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520 USA