Organizing Web Information

[Wilfred [Bill] Drew]

Peter C. Gorman wrote:
> 

> There seems to be an implicit assumption in this thread that web documents
> form some kind of natural class. Well, maybe they do, but only in the sense
> that 'paper documents' are also a class. I haven't heard of any
> institution, library or otherwise, that has attempted to collect, catalog,
> or index all paper documents regardless of content. What we do is select -
> libraries have generally collected more books than flyers or brochures,
> because we consider that the *content* of them is more useful to our users.
> Someone, I forget who, seemed to imply that it was elitist to discriminate
> between web documents based on content. 


I am being misquoted above.  What i said was that it is elitist to ONLY
CONSIDER cataloging so-called "scholarly" material.  I am not suggesting
that every piece of garbage out there be cataloged.  I am saying do not
limit it to official "scholarly" works only.  I have seen much
"scholarly" material that was intellectual garbage.  Take a look at the
literature in the  field of parapsychology if you want to see
intellectual garbage.

> But if I'm doing research in
> Linguistics, and I'm searching an index for resources in Linguistics, I
> probably don't want to get hundreds of Linguistics grad students' home
> pages in my result set along with the language corpora and articles.
>

That would depend on the content of the of the home pages.  I have
observed a tendency recently to automaticly devalue any URL that has the
"~" (tilde) in it.  This usually means a document stored in someones
personal account (ie, homepages).  Some of the most valuable material on
the web is in persoanl homepages.  If you don't believe this look around
at librarian homepages around the web.

 
> In short, I don't see why the mere existence of millions of web pages is
> any more relevant to the cataloging/indexing problem than the existence of
> millions of flyers and brochures is.

Actually the cataloging of flyers and brochures can be a very important
activity depending on your collection efforts.  Take a look at any
history of science collection or at any local historical society or even
any university archives such as the Cornelliana collection at Cornell
University.
> 
> PG
> _______________________________
> Peter C. Gorman
> University of Wisconsin
> General Library System
> Automation Services
> pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu

--
Wilfred Drew (Call me "Bill") Serials/Reference/Systems Librarian
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