start working on your resumes...

[Mike.C.Zimmerman at DAL.frb.org]

     Before you dust off the resume, one thing to consider....Human Nature. 
      Certainly it will become incredibly easier for an individual to take 
     care of their own research.  However, the factor of why the idividual 
     was hired by an organization still comes into play.  Is it really the 
     best use of a Research Economist to do all of the literature 
     searching, all of the leg work AND create the written publication as 
     well(as well as do all of the other duties which Economists typically 
     have to perform as a part of any given organization)?  I think we will 
     be able to change the way we interact with the customer, but I do not 
     foresee us being totally cut out of the loop, unless we simply remain 
     still.  Any form of inertia is not necessarily a good thing.
     
     Mike Zimmerman
     Library Administrator
     Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: start working on your resumes...
Author:  INET:web4lib at library.berkeley.edu/ at INTERNET
Date:    1/29/97 8:56 PM


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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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