recent discussion of WWW cataloging?

[Tony Barry]

At 2:17 PM 11/10/95, atroncale at nypl.org wrote:
>     I believe that the lessons learned from MAchine Readable Cataloging
>     have not been effectively applied to the Internet.


You can embed a MARC record in the <META> tag under HTML 3 but I don't
think its practical to do it as every machine is a potential publisher.
I'm a librarian and I'm certainly not going to embed MARC records in the
documents on the three services I have some reponsibility for, as there is
no search mechanism to pick them up and do anything with them, or any
incentive yet provided by the library community.

>An heirarchical
>     structure could be built into all of these indexes if they were "told"
>     to do it in a consistent, intelligent form.

"Telling" is not all that simple.  Besides despite the best efforts of the
Library Association's Classification Research Group the use of hierachical
classification structures for detailed information retrieval does not seem
overly effective.  Conversely the automatic indexing techniques based on
statistical methodologies pioneered by   Gerard Salton[1] now have the
computing power to be effective at vastly reduced cost compared with human
indexing.

Its not indexing that is the problem buy determining what gets indexes
which is a selection/referee problem.

Tony

1. TITLE        Introduction to modern information retrieval / Gerard Salton,
                Michael J. McGill.
 AUTHOR       Salton, Gerard.
 AUTHOR       McGill, Michael J.
 PUBLISHED    New York : Mcgraw-hill, c1983.
 DESCRIPT     xv, 448 p. : ill ; 25 cm.
 SUBJECT      Information storage and retrieval systems.
 BIBLIOG.     Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
 ISBN         0070544840.


__________________________________________________________________________
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