[Sigia-l] re: the future of search

[James Weinheimer]

> Now I'm not saying librarians are becoming quaint. It's the economics
that's
> changing the equation. The distributed 'efficiency' of hundreds of
millions
> of search engines sitting on peoples' PCs is hard to compete against.
Their
> answers may not as precise as a librarian's but they may be just good
> enough. Sad to say but good enough in volume pretty much trumps everything
> else in life.

This sums up the attitude that I have heard repeated many times: "It's good
enough".
What exactly does that mean? Traditionally, it meant something very
specific: to find everything in a collection by their authors, titles and
subjects. Over the years, this increased in all sorts of ways, by keyword,
by specialized numbers (e.g. ISBN, ISSN) and other ways. This could be
checked objectively--and was many times. People could check if certain items
were found with specific searches, and if they weren't, the system didn't
work and had to be fixed.

If now we are to be satisfied with "good enough," we have to decide what
this means. I guess it means that we won't be able to find everything by
their authors, titles and subjects, so it will mean that we can find *some
of the things* in various ways. So, which items in which various ways?

On the opposite side, the argument is: it costs too much to pay for people
to describe and organize web pages.

Why? It doesn't cost too much to pay for people to make web pages--in fact,
they make quite a bit of money at it. The answer is: administrators don't
want to pay for it because they are convinced they can get the same result
for free. The results are *irrelevant* to them, because whatever people get
will be "good enough".


> Less than ten years ago, if one wanted to engage in any semi-serious
> research, one had to go to a library and, often, consult a librarian.
Today,
> hundreds of millions of people armed with nothing more than a PC and a
> browser can get at an unbelievably rich source of material from around the
> world, via search engines and other methods of referencing. This is a
> colossal change. I've lived within walking distance of an Ivy-league
library
> most of my live. I know today I walk into a library far, far less
frequently
> than, say, ten years ago.

Nobody does "research" on the web. They may want to pretend to themselves
that they do, but they don't. You can certainly get some interesting and
useful information very quickly, and you may not, but let's not delude
ourselves into thinking that anybody is doing "research". A thesis demands
much more than a couple of Google searches! Or at least, I hope it will for
a few more years!

James Weinheimer