Organizing Web Informat

[George Porter]

Subject:RE>>Organizing Web Information (was: Something...  Date:7/16/96
Time:9:12 AM

Dr. Heinrich Kuhn suggests:

>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.

Fortunately, 50 million is not a relevant number to this discussion.  In
april, Ann Okerson (presently at Yale, formerly with ARL) quoted the average
life of an electronic journal as less than 6 months as measured through the
maintenance of links generated from the newjour listserv.  Taking into account
the relative instability and lack of permanence exhibited through this
statistic AND the overwhelming amount of dross pervading the web from personal
home pages, the real question of indexing and facilitating retrieval of
stable, scholarly information may not be so daunting.  The task of separating
the wheat from the chaff appears to be nontrivial and I don't have anything to
offer on that count at the moment.

Further he states:

>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).

And that the application of metatags by document authors is the beginning of
the solution to the document indexing/retrieval problem.

Authors do not apply MeSH headings to create Index Medicus, MLS/MDs do the
indexing at the National Library of Medicine.  Authors do not apply the INSPEC
thesaurus terms to create INSPEC, MLS indexers with subject degrees do. 
Authors do not have the final say on AMS classification, although they are
asked to choose keywords and suggest AMS classes for their articles.  In
short, authors are not the ultimate source of indexing and classification for
any major indexing product.  Librarians are the professionals who have
developed the controlled vocabularies and classification schemes that have
enabled access to more than 50 million articles spanning all academic
disciplines and hundreds of years of publishing.

Karen Schneider is right to assert that indexing articles is the key to
meaningful retrieval.  The question is how to make it work.

George Porter
NCSU Libraries
george_porter at ncsu.edu