Yahoo, LII, etc.

[Jian Liu]

Another good example is Scout Report at: www.signpost.org

Jian

> 
> What intrigues me about Yahoo is that they do it at all.  We keep saying in
> our profession that we can't possibly have one catalog for the Internet...
> we can't possibly organize the Internet... yada yada yada... but  how do we
> know that?  I can think of a number of cmpanies, Yahoo among them, that
> believe they can classify the Internet, at least into a rough-sort.  Their
> work is crude and does not meet the level of classification that
> librarianship has accomplished with paper media--your average K-level
> record has more access points than any of these tools offer--but if they
> can do so much with so little, why CAN'T we organize the 'net?   Why
> haven't we started with the proposition that this was doable?  Why is it
> that we accept a mammoth union database like OCLC but can't project this to
> the online environment?  Why haven't we done our OWN Yahoo, sans the
> McInternet stuff?
> 
> I'm going to play make-believe with Librarian's Index to the Internet.  LII
> is a nice tool--but it is small; this is not a criticism, but an
> observation.  So let's grow this mustard seed.  Apply for grants, take a
> pile of money and start hiring.  If there were one person assigned to each
> subject area, it would be much larger.  If each citation had more metadata,
> maybe a la the PICS label but used MARCishly for descriptive purposes, it
> would take more time to maintain it, so let's double the number of
> librarians working on LII.  But then let's add some brainiacs to the mix
> who figure out how to extract a lot of the information--we'll call it fixed
> data--that we now laboriously assign by hand when we catalog books.  So now
> it's a little faster to do.  Now let's tack on a big government grant (kind
> of like going public).  More staff, better indexing, more money for the
> brainiacs to develop better tools for automating organization and
> retrieval.  Now let's merge the RCLS kid's database with LII for a
> children's room (similar to Yahooligans).  Another ggrant rolls in, and we
> buy up a few more small collections and give 'em the big standardized
> reorg.  The records also go into Intercat, of course.
> 
> As for the kids, Yahooligans was created to make money for Yahoo; Surfwatch
> features a setting which can restrict Surfwatch to the Yahooligans
> database, and lame it is, but the concept is interesting, if we are talking
> about customizing a database so different users have different resources
> presented differently.
> 
> So now we have the LII--perhaps renamed a little more slickly, like
> Find-All--beefed up into a non-commercial database, cooperatively
> maintained by funding, congruent with existing standards, searchable on its
> own or through any library catalog--many views, same data.  High public
> trust, high quality, all the good stuff we stand for... 
> 
> dreaming away in the Northeast... there are over 150,000 librarians in the
> U.S.; we can't do this?
> ______________________________________________
> Karen G. Schneider |  kgs at bluehighways.com
> Director, US EPA Region 2 Library  |  Contractor, GCI
> Councilor-at-Large, American Library Association
> The Internet Filter Assessment Project:   
>  http://www.bluehighways.com/tifap/
> Author, Forthcoming: A Practical Guide to Internet Filters
> (Neal Schuman, 1997 ISBN 1-55570-322-4)
> Information is hard work  -------------------------------------------
>