[WEB4LIB] Re: Appropriate Organizational Scheme for Diverse Web

[Richard Wiggins]

I agree with your advice, but, for the record: Yahoo was founded by two
Stanford electrical engineering graduate students with zero library
training. In fact, they approached a friend of mine, a librarian with an MLS
and lots of online experience, before they launched their business, and
asked her for help in "building a catalog of the entire Internet." She told
them it was an impossible task, that only a selective catalog was possible,
and they needed to rethink their goals. They built the basic Yahoo model
with little if any traditional library expertise.

Of course the rest is history. The Yahoo founders are billionaires, and the
first librarian they did hire is the richest librarian on the planet,
according to The New York Times. My friend rues her too-realistic
assessment.

What they built bears little resemblance to most traditional catalogs
previously built in the library world. They made it far simpler. In fact I
claim it's a pretty poor catalog despite its enormous business success...


/rich

____


If we could explain in one email message how to set up an overarching
knowledge schema to be used to catalog a large, diverse body of knowledge,
and have the system
be operable by non-information specialists, then we'd have beat out Yahoo!,
Excite, AltaVista, etcetera a looong time ago. It's why Yahoo! has scores
of librarians on the payroll.

Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
www.netfact.com/rww         wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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