brittanica ... soundex... etc.

[Karen G. Schneider]

Back when I was a records clerk for a juvenile court (1977-1979), we used
Soundex for filing juvenile cases.  We were also entering data into
computers, which I now realize probably obsolesced the old Soundex system,
at least at the point where they were ready to give up paper records. (For
years afterwards, when someone would introduce themselves I would mentally
recode their last name into Soundex.)  Anyway, Soundex did allow for a lot
of searching flexibility.  We were told it was designed by the FBI, not the
phone companies, and one website I found attributes Soundex to the National
Archives, while yet another site attributes Soundex to the U.S. Census.
Maybe the pilgrims brought it on the Mayflower?

Anyway, this cure really only scratches the surface of the naming issues on
the Internet. The slim margin of error for identifying a website--and so
dependent on a highly variable skill, orthography--is really a presenting
symptom.  The underlying problem has more to do with the shallow structure
of the Internet naming system, which like a lot of things about the Internet
was never designed to scale to the size of the online world as we now know
it--let alone the online world as it will be in ten years, fifty years,
another century... The fact that the name of the site is the only index
point--and an index point with severe limitations--has been written about
extensively.  A nifty book with several good articles on the topic is
"Coordinating the Internet," edited by Brian Kahin and James H. Keller.

In the meantime, given that we live in the present, I do like the idea of
library catalogs with cross-references from "bad" spelling.  Library
catalogs in general are rapidly becoming the simpletons of the database
world, compared to their smarter--and younger--brothers and sisters. How
could this change?

Karen G. Schneider kgs at bluehighways.com
Assistant Director of Technology
Shenendehowa Public Library, Clifton Park, NY
http://www.shenpublib.org