Role of librarians

[Nick Arnett]

Tom Eland wrote:

>It is my contention that either librarians get involved and index the
>Internet,
>or we will be stuck once again using inferior indexes designed by those who do
>not understand how people search for and use information.

I've been working so hard the last few months that I haven't contributed
much to the list, but I've been playing close attention -- because I agree
completely with this statement.  Publishers also need to be involved to
"package" information, but I'm quite convinced that understanding three
points of view -- library/academic, publishing and technology -- is
essential to success on the net.

I've just started a leave of absence to do some writing and research,
though I'll still represent Verity at conferences and such.  I spoke a
couple of weeks ago at a conference on cataloging the net, sponsored by the
University of Michigan and NIST.  It was, as I had hoped, a refreshing
change from the usual computer-industry conferences where everyone has
pretty much the same point of view.

Anyway, I wanted to offer some reassurance that there are people in
industry who are paying attention.

One other note -- most of the Web-based search services are using
relatively unsophisticated search technology.  As the market for the
higher-performance engines grows (explodes is more like it), the cost of
those tools is coming down and I'd expect that searching some of these
services will become much more useful.  Though I'm obviously biased, I find
it so frustrating to use plain Boolean search that I've written my own
robots that do iterative searches and relevancy-rank the results with our
engine... ;-)

Just as people thought they'd never learn fonts, leading, etc., to
publishing on paper, most don't think they'll learn search techniques and
query languages... but they will.

Nick Arnett
Internet Marketing Manager
Verity Inc.