Web search tools compared

[Tony Barry]

At 6:35 PM 10/10/95, "Ian Winship, Univ Northumbria Info Services"
<ian.winship at unn. wrote:
>I have just had published an article  World Wide Web searching tools - an
>evaluation   in the UK library magazine VINE (99) 1995, 49-54.

The article start -
>The Internet is an unstructured information resource - no overall control,
>a mixture of
>services, no standard format, no subject organisation or comprehensive
>index - compared
>with printed and electronic sources already familiar to librarians. There
>are subject
>indexes, but their multiplicity and fundamental differences make use
>confusing - which is
>best, do we need to use them all, what are they searching?
>

Print publishing is an unstructured information resource - no overall
control (There are multiple publishers without central direction and no
centralised index), a mixture of
services (A large variety of abstracting and indexing services of often
only having their index terms in english and no standard thesaurus and each
library runs its own catalogue - worse they overlap in coverage!) , no
standard format (varieties of the standard format MARC are used but this is
not used for display of citations and many other standards are used for
display), no subject organisation or comprehensive index (unlike the
internet where single sites are trying to provide _global_ indexes as
research projects).

You would think that with 500 years of experience print could be doing
better ;^)

The surprising thing is not that the internet is a mess but that it works
so well, and does so largely without the help of that group, we librarians,
whose expertise could be applied - maybe.

Tony

__________________________________________________________________________
Tony Barry                  URL:http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/People/TonyB.html
Centre for Networked Information and Publishing & also
Centre for Networked Access to Scholarly Information  fone  +61 6 249 4632
Australian National University Library                phax  +61 6 279 8120
Canberra  A.C.T. 0200, AUSTRALIA                      tony at info.anu.edu.au