recent discussion of WWW cataloging?

[Calarco, Pascal]

On Tuesday, October 10, Mike Perkins (mperkins at mail.sdsu.edu) mused:

>Amid all the discussion and evaluation of the myriad search engines now
>available on the Internet, has anyone else noted that one of the effects
>of using these engines is that we are transfering work that used to be
>the responsibility of indexers, librarians and other information
>professionals to our users?  All the intellectual effort that used to go
>into producing indexes, bibliographies and catalogs is now the
>responsibility of the user.  Effective use of these search engines
>requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge, not only of the subject being
>researched, but of language itself, something lacking in many new college
>students.
>Just some thoughts.

I don't really see this as very much of a difference as the manner in which 
other
library activities are conducted these days.  Just as end-user searching of
bibliographic databases has grown with its popularization (and 
affordability)
over the years, so has end-user Internet usage increased.  What the 
librarian's
role is in these situations is to 1) act as intermediaries for those users 
to help
them use Internet search engines effectively, and 2) apply some organization
and filter the most relevant/best resources for our users.  Throughout the
library system here at Yale is an effort to create selective subject trees 
of
WWW resources filtered by professional librarians.  Indexing and 
classifying!
We aren't dead as a profession yet!  Even with our skills in information
retrieval some of these search engines still produce marginal results, and
that is where we can proactively step in and bring some order to the flux!

Pascal V. Calarco
IAIMS Assistant, Librarian
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University

>Mike Perkins
>SDSU Library
>mperkins at mail.sdsu.edu