Searching your web pages

[Kevin C. Marsh]

>Re: Searching your web pages
>
>We (http://www.artic.edu) are using a program called Excite, 
>but we are currently reconfiguring it and it is currently offline. 
>It is very easy to install and updates itself regularly, in cron.
>
>Here is a small quote from the excite web page (http://www.excite.com/):
>
>Excite is a new generation of web navigation software from Architext. It
>gives your web server the same advanced search capabilities used on
>Netscape, HotWired, Sega and other hot web sites. All in a high-performance
>package that's incredibly easy to install and maintain.

Excite seems to have everything a librarian could want... except standards
compliance.*  If you build a database and connect it to the Web without also
offering Z39.50 compliant access, you close the door on the possibility of
searching your collection and other similar collections simultaneously with
a single query.  I would think that this would be especially important to
art collections since the works of any artist, period, style, etc. are
likely to be dispersed among several collections.

In order for the Internet to reach it's potential as an information
resource, it is essential that every serious knowledge collection comply
with the Z39.50 standard.  Programers are endlessly inventive when it come
to search engines and user interfaces, and marketers will try to sell you
anything (especially if it is proprietary), but it is the responsibility of
librarians and other collection managers to insist on standards compliance.
We are experiencing the same kind of problems today with Internet databases
that we had 20 years ago with local library automation systems.  We demanded
MARC compliance then and we should demand Z39.50 compliance now.  

There is nothing about the Excite search engine that would prevent them from
adding Z39.50 compliance, as far as I can tell.  I am copying this message
to Architext in order to encourage them to do so.

* Ok, many librarians also want structured fields of data in order to
support nice features like date range searching, author/artist searching, et
cetera.  Excite looks like a good tool for indexing many kinds of web sites,
but perhaps not for libraries and other knowledge collections.  

>Manuel A. Hernandez          Network Administrator
>mhernandez at artic.edu        Art Institute of Chicago
>(312) 629-6552        111 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL  60603
>irc: teeze #art            http://www.artic.edu/~mhernand

Kevin C. Marsh, Executive Director
Information Access Institute
IAI at neosoft.com     http://www.neosoft.com/~iai