Organizing Web Informat

[Wilfred [Bill] Drew]

George Porter wrote:
> 
> 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.


Why are we only supposed to index so-called "Scholarly" information?  There are many 
other sources besides that from "scholars" that needs to be indexed and is of value.
Much of the information in electronic discussion groups would be considered "dross" by 
some but would be useful for those studying popular culture and the growth of the 
emerging information society.   The condemnation of personal home pages is troubling at 
best and certainly smells like intellectual elitism.  The lack of permanence is just a 
fact of life in an electronic based medium and is also one of the strengths of the World 
Wide Web.  There must be some selection and collection development but don't limit it to 
only scholarly material.

> 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.

I agree with this statement.  Librarians should be creating the indexing and 
classification schemes while authors could pick a particular classification from such a 
scheme.  There is no longer time for librarians to fully catalog every new electronic 
document that comes along.

> 
> 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.

There is no reason why authors couldn't select from such classification schemes.  
Validity of information could be based on the mechanisms already in place such as peer 
review, background of the authors and such.  Librarians could continue to select and 
develop electronic collections in the same way we now develop paper based collections 
using the same standards but needing new tools.

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

I don't see indexing and classification as the really difficult part.  Selection and 
collection development are the real sticking points.  What items do we include in such a 
catalog?  We need an electronic version of CHOICE and Library Journal reviews.  The 
present journals can not fill that need because of the amount of new information coming 
out every day.

--
Wilfred Drew (Call me "Bill") Serials/Reference/Systems Librarian
SUNY College of Ag. & Tech.;   P.O. Box 902;  Morrisville, NY 13408-0902
Internet: DREWWE at SNYMORVA.CS.SNYMOR.EDU
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Homepage: http://www.snymor.edu/~drewwe/
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