a few steps together

Gary Fouty g-fout at maroon.tc.umn.edu
Tue Jun 4 20:49:00 EDT 1996


To pick up on remarks of Nick Arnett and Gail Wanner, I think the goal is
for librarians and techies to work together to make information products
easy to use, with the details transparent to the user.  I am a bit disturbed
by the attitude of some that simple keyword searching of full text will
suffice.  I even heard one of the Gopher developers remark about that
distant time when full-text searching was first developed (back in 1992!!!).
On the other hand one of the young programmers working on our University Web
site came up with the great idea of page developers on campus using keywords
to describe their pages so the search engine could function better.
Similarly, I recently heard of a commercial outfit working on an extension
of HTML to include content description based on controlled vocabulary!!
(The notion being that if businesses want to be found on the Web they will
benefit from being well-indexed.)  Well, glory be!  How many decades have we
been doing this sort of thing in libraries?  My point is that information
retrieval has a history and it contains some enduring concepts that can
contribute to the ongoing dialog.  At the same time we are in a new
computing environment that calls for new ways of doing things.  Both 'sides'
can contribute to future progress.


Gary Fouty                       Science/Engineering Library       
108 Walter Library              Univ. Minnesota -- Twin Cities      
117 Pleasant St. S.E. #108             (612)-624-1851
Minneapolis MN 55455                   g-fout at tc.umn.edu



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