a few steps together

[Matt Theobald]

Does this confirm or deny Mr. Fouty's assertion? 

The current  state of organization on the Inernet is a good example of how 
history does't always repeat itself.  It is undenyably a problem.  
Vastly unlike UNIVAC, the problems are radically different because the 
element of control is lost.  There was never the potential that anyone could 
access UNIVAC.  

It is not a matter of some programmers knowig about indexing styles and 
effective organization. It is neccesry that all internet programmers have 
access to people or resources that prevent them from creating black holes 
the lose information or generating a quandry of obscure and irrelvant 
hits.  

In my humble opinion (IMHO),

This is the "golden mean".  Librarians must have an understanding of 
systems in order to see applications.  Programmers must realize that 
there are models and standards for organization that can be transferred.
Alphabetization is easy enough, but somewhere in the education of 
-computer science- that has been lost to the hope for artificial search 
agents that do not provide a better way to filter as well as be 
comprehensive.  As many librarins should be ready and willing to sit at 
the table with programmers as vice-cersa.  I think the results would be 
astounding.

Thanks for reading,

Matt Theobald
IU SLIS Graduate Student

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .      
  .  Matthew Theobald   --------------- * Connecting      .
    .   Internet Information Specialist     Your Mind       .
      .    Indianapolis, Indiana              with the Body   . 
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                                    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .



Sincerely, 

Matt

On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, Alain Vaillancourt wrote:

> 
> > From: Gary Fouty <g-fout at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
> > To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> > Subject: a few steps together
> > 
> > To pick up on remarks of Nick Arnett and Gail Wanner, I think the goal is
> > for librarians and techies to work together to make information products
> > easy to use, with the details transparent to the user.  I am a bit disturbed
> > by the attitude of some that simple keyword searching of full text will
> > suffice.  I even heard one of the Gopher developers remark about that
> > distant time when full-text searching was first developed (back in 1992!!!).
> 
> 
>   In any discipline, quite a few individuals are unaware of its past.
> 
> Programmers have been making computer generated indexes for about 40 
> years.
> 
> One of the biggest and most important undertakings in the History of 
> Computing was in the early 60s when Univac-Sperry and IBM slugged it 
> out in court for the title of legal inventor of electronic computing, 
> and central to this slugfest was a computer generated index of all 
> the documents used during the court proceedings.
> 
> Au revoir!
> 
> Alain Vaillancourt
>