Organizing Web information

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

DeAnne Luck (LUCKDL at APSU01.APSU.EDU) wrote on Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:19:

> Here's an idea:  What if a central office was set up with maybe 2 or 
> 3 people to which web page authors vould submit their pages.  
> This office would keep a database of librarians from all over the
> country or the world, and the URL for the homepage would be automatically
> sent to an appropriate librarian knowledgeable about that subject (I suppose
> the page authors would decide on their own broad subject area).  The
> librarians could be those that already particiapte in OCLC or other bib
> utiliies.  The librarians would assign subject terms as metadata, and send
> that back to the author, who would then attach it to his or her page.

This would be a good idea *IF* there are not to many authors who
are using this offer or *if* you get enough manpower payed to
put it into praxis. Just Medline has indexed from January '96 to 
sometime in June more than 165.000 documents. You would need 
quite a number of specialized librarians to cope with that.
Certainly at the moment there are *far* less than 165.000 new
documents coming to the web per half-year that are of a somewhat
more elevated potential relevance to clinical medicine,
but this may change ... .
   And why centralize the thing (even if in a virtual way only)? 
Why not have the authors of the documents resort to the librarians
and other specialists at *their* place for help on indexing?
The results certainly will not be as consistent and as good as
is the indexing by the specialists of e.g. NLM, but it will be
far better than nothing, and it would permit better retrieval
via search engines than what we have now.

   I would like to use the occasion to respond to those who
stressed that some "weeding" would have to be done and to those
who insisted that authors' indexing would not have the quality
of indexing done by *real* specialists:
    The model proposed: indexing by authors: does not preclude
that a library can decide do give a real thorough cataloguing
to *part* of the material on the net *in addition* to the 
indexing by the authors. That's up to the choice of the library.
    And, yes: The indexing done by authors won't have the quality
of the indexing done by real specialists at an institution like NLM.
But it will be better than what we have now: either near to no
indexing of web-documents at all, or at the most author's keywords.
indexing by authors does not hinder experts to enter the document
with a better indexing than the author's one into a database.

> I've not studied up on metadata schemes, but I assume these terms could
> be searched with an altavista type search engine.

Yes, they can - though to make best use of a scheme like the
one proposed by me some features should be added to the search
engines exixting at present.

> 
> If libraries (and librarians) looked at this as they do OCLC, 

The OCLC WordCat is about monographs mostly, not about single 
articles. There is no common catalogue for articles from all 
fields of scholarly endeavours for the "world of print" 
- unfortunately(!!). The major search engines however are such 
things for vast parts of the "electronic world". But they do 
not work as good as they should - or could if better metadata 
were available. The proposal "structured indexing by authors 
via META-tags" might perhaps help here.

> I see the central office as being sponsored/funded by LC and other national
> libraries, making it a world-wide library initiative.  
(...)
> Comments?  I know there would be a lot of problems to be worked out, but
> how's the theory?

The theory is good, but I'm sceptic if it is possible to get
it going (because of financial constraints mainly). I think
your model is a better one than mine, but I fear it has even 
less chances to become reality. Yours is better, mine might
be more practical. But i'd be honestly very happy if I were
proven wrong!

Heinrich C. Kuhn
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