[WEB4LIB] Re: New Search Tools under Development

[Karen Coyle]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 11:49, Thomas Dowling wrote:
> 
> [Do the British wax so rhapsodic about digitising the entire British 
> Library?]

Some do. I was confronted by one such at a computer conference where I
was the only librarian (oh, and only woman) on a panel about the future
of intellectual property. This fellow got up afterward, stated his
credentials as a British computer scientist, and said that he had heard
that the British Library had some large sum of money which they were
using for something (which I don't remember) and HE thought they should
instead use it to "digitise" the entire collection. When I replied that
we hadn't yet figured out a good way to deliver book-length texts in a
way that people wanted to read them, he said:

"I have just one word for you. [pause] Google."

At the time it seemed silly, but I suppose that he was essentially
predicting Yahoo's "search inside the book." I tried talking to him
afterward and there was no way to get him to contemplate that a search
on "England History" in such a collection would not be useful. Not even
when I reminded him that keyword searches do not go across different
languages. Or different spellings (labor, labour). The desire on the
part of some people to quantify problems is amazingly strong. He also
had a rather elevated sense of his ability to do good research. He kept
insisting that he could refine a search until he got just what he
needed. I came away with the feeling that he'd probably missed a lot of
good reading with his methodology, but to recognize that would be
heresy.

-- 
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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