start working on your resumes...

[Lou Rosenfeld]

Did you know that computers will soon organize and index lots of stuff,
huge "treasure troves" even?  Well, as reported in Science (see below),
it's only a matter of time.  I guess this means we librarians should start
considering new lines of work.  And we shouldn't be surprised, given how
much easier it has become to find information in distributed networks such
as the Internet...  Honestly, it's sad that in this day and age
"respected" publications still cling to this silliness that organization
and classification of information can be wholly automated. 

DIGITAL LIBRARIES:  THE FUTURE
The vision of computers powerful enough to organize and index huge treasure
troves of scientific literature using intelligent functions such as
"vocabulary switching" -- classifying an article that mentions "Unix" under
"operating systems" even if the words "operating systems" do not appear in
the article -- is finally coming to fruition, 32 years after it was first
outlined in J.C.R. Licklider's "Libraries of the Future" (1965).
Large-scale simulations on the HP Convex Exemplar supercomputer at the
National Center for Supercomputer Applications have resulted in generating
concept spaces for 10 million journal abstracts across 1,000 subject areas
covering all engineering and science disciplines -- the largest vocabulary
switching computation ever achieved in information science.  Future
developments will require automatic indexing with scaleable semantics to
coordinate searches among the one billion repositories likely in the next
century.  (Science 17 Jan 97 p327)

(snarfed from the 1/27/97 EDUPAGE)

Louis Rosenfeld                                             lou at argus-inc.com
Argus Associates, Inc.                                   http://argus-inc.com
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