a few steps together

[Alain Vaillancourt]

> From: Gary Fouty <g-fout at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: a few steps together
> 
> 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!!!).


In any discipline, quite a few individuals are unaware of its past.

Programmers have been making computer generated indexes for about 40 
years.

One of the biggest and most important undertakings in the History of 
Computing was in the early 60s when Univac-Sperry and IBM slugged it 
out in court for the title of legal inventor of electronic computing, 
and central to this slugfest was a computer generated index of all 
the documents used during the court proceedings.

Au revoir!

Alain Vaillancourt