[Web4lib] RE: library automation vendors

[Lars Aronsson]

Matthew J. Dovey wrote:

> I had to delve into the Internet Archive to find it - but it might be
> that Steve Coffman's then controversial article of 1999 might be
> beginning to become reality:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20001214191900/http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/mar99/coffman.htm

Thanks for bringing the link up. It is sad (and ironic?) that the 
article can no longer be FOUND on the website of SEARCHER 
Magazine, and we are lucky to have the Internet Archive.

I remember this article, because I based a speech on it, that I 
gave to a group of librarians in Jonkoping, Sweden, in May 1999, 
transcript in Swedish at http://susning.nu/Lars_Aronsson/19990527 
I don't think anybody in the audience understood a word of what I 
said then, because it was too early.  And now you don't understand 
a word, because it's in Swedish.

The pattern that Coffman saw in Amazon.com was how they turned 
business upside-down by first building the catalog, then 
attracting customers, and getting the contents (wares, books) 
last.  He wanted to apply this to a library that only has access 
to a union catalog and offers interlibrary loans, before it has 
any stacks or collections of its own.

In reality, and in the perspective of consortia, such a virtual 
library could find it hard to enter a consortium because it cannot 
provide any catalog records from its own collection to the other 
members.  It's like coming empty handed to a potluck dinner.

Anyway, in my speech I observed that Yahoo had been doing the same 
as Amazon.com, but with web content rather than printed books.  
By first cataloging what other websites could provide and allowing 
users to search this link catalog, it got a notion of what was 
missing on the web, for example weather reports, news, and maps.  
Then Yahoo went outside of its cataloging role to become a content 
provider of weather reports, news, and maps.

Adding the content that is missing, is of course exactly what 
Google is doing with Google Print.  And nobody knows what's 
missing better than Google.  The gold is not in the result lists, 
but in Google's internal log of search queries.  I find it odd 
that Google News is still just a cataloging service, and not a 
news report provider of its own.  Google Maps has gone further.

In my speech I described how volunteer-based digitization in 
Project Runeberg uses the same principles by allowing contributors 
to focus on topics, authors, books, and pages that interest them 
instead of having a centralized plan for what to digitize.  Later 
Wikipedia has taken this principle to its extreme.  There is no 
central plan for what to cover in this encyclopedia.  Everybody 
can write and improve articles on their favorite topics.

The common principle is that the Internet is used for collecting 
input from very large audiences.  For stores like Amazon.com it 
tells the company where to make more money.  For volunteer 
projects it tells contributors what to work on.

Librarians, of course, acquire the books and journals that patrons 
ask for, so the library system is in part based on demand.  But is 
your OPAC producing statistics on search queries that missed?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se