Organizing Web Information (was: Something Missing)

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

Already on Fri, 12 Jul 1996 06:25 Karen Schneider 
(SCHNEIDER.KAREN at epamail.epa.gov) wrote the following lines:

> I don't see any way to avoid indexing documents.  Five minutes with Alta
> Vista makes that obvious.  I do think I see something similar to Netfirst,
> but publicly-accessible, and distributed.  As in, a cataloging project that
> pointed to records consolidated in various electronic consortia.  And
> maybe records that could be exported to MARC and GILS, but weren't
> necessarily MARC in origin--and with several levels of cataloging, so
> normal folk could contribute records which could be enhanced by
> llibrarians.   Any thoughts here?  

The present search engines certainly are good to have but I agree:
What they give us is far from sufficient. Some sort of responsible
indexing, some sort of cataloguing will have to be done. And mere
author's keaywords won't improve the situation too much. BUT:
With now probably some 50 million documents on the web (and the 
number still rising fast) it is obvious that it will be impossible
to catalogue them all.

Marc Gooch (mgooch at sledge.law.csuohio.edu)wrote concerning this
(Fri, 12 Jul 1996 08:53):
> I don't think we are trying to catalog every resource on the Internet 
> just as we cannot say that every book, etc. is cataloged.  Besides, we 
> wouldn't necessarily want to catalog everything.  What we can do (and I 
> understand that Temple is NOT trying to discourage us from it), though, 
> is to catalog good Internet resources. 

With the number of net-documents existing I fear it's even impossible
to catalogue the real good and stable ones [:-(].

The SearchEngines are not providing us with what we want to have.
And manual catloguing won't help us very far neither. And we cannot
afford to give up. So back to Karen Schneider's quote from Lenin
(I think it was Lenin): what is to be done?

Net-documents seem more resemblant to articles than to monographs.
In many fields of research authors have shown to be able to cope
with rather sophisticated types of indexing for articles (like MeSH).
META-tags can be adapted and adopted for well-structured indexing.
Documents carrying well-structured indexing-information in their
META-tags could be valiantly indexed by search engines just a
trifle more elaborate than nowadays' Altavista. So why not use 
META-tags, why not use subject-depending indexing (MeSH for medical
stuff, AMS-classification for mathematical documents, etc. etc. pp.)
and leave the indexing to authors (while giving them a helping
librarian's hand to the proper use of such indexing ...)?

(If that ideas does not appear to you to be a completely mad  
one you might have a look at
http://www.gwdg.de/~hkuhn1/wwwcat/mtprop00.html   for a short
       proposal I made concerning such a use of META-tags, at
http://www.gwdg.de/~hkuhn1/wwwcat/mtprop01.html   for an a bit
       more elaborate version of that proposal,   and [if you 
       should read German] at
http://www.gwdg.de/~hkuhn1/wwwcat/gfkl96v.html    for the text of 
       a paper in which I tried to present these ideas at a meeting
       of librarians and other opeople interested in questions of
       classification.)

Heinrich C. Kuhn
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