Organizing Web Information

[Marc Salomon]

Wilfred [Bill] Drew <drewwe at snymorva.cs.snymor.edu>
|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.

|Why can't a creator of a document pick subject headings out of an authority
|controlled subject list?

This might be a partial-measure between full-text (free lunch) and
librarian-quality (pricy lunch) original cataloging.  One hard part of the
problem is determining the authority-controlled list of headings and the other
hard part is using those terms correctly.  Real indexing/cataloging is a
high-value-added process that must be learned.  Just asking people not trained
in indexing to pick a keyword/subject heading for their work would give the
illusion of regular indexing with few of its benefits.

|What is needed is a publication dedicated solely to reviewing World Wide Web
|and Internet based docuements.

Production of which would be an intractable problem in its own right.

Its time to hone Occam's Razor so that we can split this problem into pieces of
a managable size. There is no way that you could do a books in print that
covers all print publications, including those that fly under the cost filters
that have kept paper publishing elitist, inaccessable and somewhat priviliged.
 It is possible to put one's virtual arms around the universe of scholarly
publishing, perhaps by discipline, and apply rigorous indexing techniques there
where they are needed.

With the advent of desktop publishing over the past 13 years (recall that laser
printers were barely accessible to mortals prior to 1982) before the explosion
in accessibility to the internet, the traditional library model has not been
able to document the proliferation of self-published work.  If the paper
library hasn't had to deal with this kind of publication as a peer of the book,
then why should the digital library?

-marc

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