[WEB4LIB] RE: Candidates for _Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organ

[Tara Calishain]

At 11:42 AM 5/3/99 -0700, Leonard Will wrote:
>In article <A53F9D66ECB2D111A24C00805F5702940168B2FA at binnycexc001.cahner
>s.com>, on Mon, 3 May 1999 at 07:25:06, Minkel, Walter (Cahners -NYC)
><URL: mailto:WMinkel at cahners.com> writes
>>Dewey or LC are
>>useful for items that cannot be searched by keywords, but why is it
>>necessary, other than the fact that the books have call numbers, to sort Web
>>sites that way?
>
>A classified catalogue offers much more than just a "mark and park"
>system for shelving books. The idea is to arrange access to information
>resources in a logical and systematic sequence, so that related
>materials are found together, even though you may not know the words
>that have been used for indexing them. In a classified catalogue, a
>single item may appear at more than one place, if it deals with more
>than one topic - although if it is a book it can occupy only one place
>on the shelf.

Leonard's post was very good, but I want to add something about sorting
Web sites by LCC and Dewey -- and forgive me if this is a little off-thread:

Using classification in conjunction with a search engine you can automate
a lot of the filtering routine.

For example, say a school child needs to do a report on starfish. They go
into the library and tell the librarian, "I need information on starfish." The
librarian knows the LCC classficiation for sea animals, and can point the
child to the appropriate books. 

This breaks down on the Internet because starfish can mean software, 
music, sea animals, and probably lots of other things. But what if an LC
code was buried within a meta-tag? A child could go to a search engine
and type in starfish. The search engine would do a second page asking
for clarification (perhaps the question "which starfish did you mean?" along
with a picture of a starfish, the Starfish Software logo, and an Other
Starfish graphic) 

Once the search engine was satisfied that the child meant the sea animal, 
the search engine would submit the starfish search to its database AND
submit the word "starfish" to its LC database. The LC database would
return an LC classification. Once the search engine had that classification, 
it could filter its raw starfish search results for those which had a
matching LC classification within its meta-tag. Voila, instant relevance. 

... maybe. I can't help feeling that if it was this simple someone would
have done it by now.

Tara




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