What's so different about the net?

[Tony Barry]

At 9:32 PM 17/10/95, weibel at oclc.org wrote:
>Surrogate records -- catalogs, abstracts, finding records --
>are valuable in and of themselves: they afford the means to
>constrain seaches and sharpen the relevance of search terms.
>This will be increasingly evident as the size of the web grows,
>and  result sets grow to unmanageable size.  Without the
>structure of surrogate records and the added value of human-coded
>description, the retrieval problem will get worse much faster.

But this does not need to be "catalogue" records as such.  Its meta
information that the publisher is in the best position to insert.

>
>But not necessarily the Web ofthe future, when we will have document
>repositories of record, formal naming of resources that will support
>graceful migration of records and resources themselves, and perhaps
>more robust linkage.

But we might also have cooperative groups sharing information across their
repositories such that a "document" will have parts in many places and the
whole in none.

>surfing for  probably fine.  If you need to access important links in a
>scholarly research thread, a library catalog may be better suited.

Or an archive maintained by the scholarly community (which may employ
librarians anlong with database people and discipline people)

>what will happen.  Those who add value will prosper.  Gentlepeople,
>start your engines.

And be fast on your feet ;^)

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