Organizing Web Information

[Wilfred [Bill] Drew]

marc at ckm.ucsf.edu wrote:
> 
> George Porter wrote:
> |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.
> 
> This is a collection development problem that does not lend itself easily
> to an automated solution.
> 
> Wilfred [Bill] Drew in response to George Porter:
> |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.
> 
> |The condemnation of personal home pages is troubling at best and certainly
> |smells like intellectual elitism.
> 
> As an indexing problem, choosing a relatively coherent subset of web info
> is a nice simplifying assumption.  Theory being, if one can successfully
> index that coherent subset, those lessons and techniques can be propigated
> upwards in scope towards the web as a whole.

Good point.  The point I am trying to make is that it is a mistake to
throw out all personal homepages such as George Porter implies.  The
work I have done in my guide to agriculture resides off my homepages not
off of our institutional homepages.  there are many other such examples
out there.
> 
> This is an active debate, especially here in SF, where our brand spanking
> new main library has popular press a-plenty (travel books, self-help books,
> newsweek, time, etc) but has engaged in an herbicidal weeding policy designed
> not to eliminate fluff, but to cram a city-mandated growing collection into a
> space that was (erroneously?) designed too small.  What is made room for and
> kept compared to what is tossed is an interesting comparison.
> 
> |> 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.
> 
> Sorry, but there is no free lunch.  And I do not believe that every web object
> *deserves* to be classified in-depth.  Do web objects have abstract rights,
> as in right-to-life or equal access to indexing?  Librarians' hands will be
> full cataloging every new electronic document from set of classes of documents
> that have been determined worthy of analysis in any case.  So don't count on
> accessing EVERY or even MOST web documents through a legitimate LCSH search.

What does what I said have to do with free or otherwise?  I am simply
suggesting that authors could do at lest the preliminary selection of a
spot in the classification scheme.  I am in no way suggesting that all
documents end up in a catalog maintianed by librarians.  That would be
cumbersome and impossible to do.

> 
> The intellectual high-value-added of indexing and cataloging is not a task
> that can be left to amateurs or even programs.  Someone at the WWW conf in
> Paris in May asked "How many people fill out the metadata box in MS Word
> for each doc they create?"  It probably cannot even be left to <META> tags
> and HTTP MIME header fields if it is to function in a manner librarians would
> like to become accustomed to.

I am afraid I must disagree to a certain extent with the above
statement.  The task can be left to "amateurs" and prgrams to a certain
extent.  Why can't a creator of a document pick subject headings out of
an authority controlled subject list?  That could serve as cataloging at
a minimal level.  If a librarian wanted to add more that could come
later.  The whole idea is to speed up the process.


> |The present journals can not fill that need because of the amount of new
> |information coming out every day.


What I am refering to are the journals that serve as tools for
collection development librarians not journals in general.  I am talking
about CHOICE or Pulbishers Weekly or review colums in Library Jorunal
and the various ALA publications.  What is needed is a publication
dedicated solely to reviewing World Wide Web and Internet based
docuements.

I hope this thread continues.  It is a good discussion.

--
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
Phone: (315)684-6055 or 684-6060 Fax: (315)684-6115 
Homepage: http://www.snymor.edu/~drewwe/
Not Just Cows Homepage: http://www.snymor.edu/~drewwe/njc/
LibraryLinks: http://www.snymor.edu/pages/library/
--