[WEB4LIB] NY Times article - Google and Rights

[Athena Hoeppner]

The author claims "The biggest problem is that search engines like
Google skim only the thinnest layers of information that has been
digitized."  I disagree.  Standardized indexing and federated searching
could resolve the problem to a large extent.

I am struck that the article made no mention of licensing and rights. 
IMO, the big issues are:
1. adequate copyright protection so that publishers feel comfortable
allowing their content to be crawled
2. rights management so that users can access content free of charge to
which they already have rights.  The rights secured by third parties
(i.e. libraries and other organizations) need to be recognized.
3. role-based filtering or relevancy ranking to help the user select
appropriate materials.  The bigger the heap of content indexed by the
likes of Google the less likely the user is to find what they need.  Or,
the bigger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle.

I have a fond hope that Shibboleth or its successors may address the
rights management issue and may lay the foundation for role-based
filtering.  

Athena

Athena Hoeppner
Electronic Resources Librarian
athena at mail.ucf.edu    (407)823-5049


>>> "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies at uillinois.edu> 21/Jun/04 9:27 >>>
There's an article in today's online NY Times about libraries in a
"Google
world". An excerpt:

"For the last few years, librarians have increasingly seen people use
online
search sites not to supplement research libraries but to replace them.
Yet
only recently have librarians stopped lamenting the trend and started
working to close the gap between traditional scholarly research and
the
incomplete, often random results of a Google search."

Full text (free registration may be required):

http://tinyurl.com/2olwo 

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
Champaign, IL  61820

Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax:   (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu