Agents (Was Re: Students use of search engines.)

[Michael Haseltine]

This discussion has gone on to agents and such, but I'd like to go back a
step to the discussion about LC and Dewey.

I had this thought last night that something was wrong with the concept of
using these sorts of classifications. They are for finding books on shelves!
They are a minimalist system for locating things in physical space, and
that's not what's needed. In the library, we don't want to have a copy of an
item in each section for each subject it covers, so we assign it the best
possible single place that covers as much as possible. On the net we can
happily 'put' an item every place we think it might be looked for.

All I'm trying to say is that it's subject headings we need not
classification numbers.
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Michael Haseltine -- Arid Lands Information Center, University of Arizona
haseltin at ag.arizona.edu