[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[Karen Coyle]

Peter, thanks.

What jumps out at me here is not the concept of "authority" but of 
"findability." The information that people use is the information that 
they find, and knowing human nature, it's the information that they find 
most easily. In 1984 or so, the U of California MELVYL catalog put up 
its first A&I database online -- Medline. The reasons for that were not 
that we thought it was the most highly used database; it wasn't: the 
only folks with current access were researchers in the med schools (this 
was before it was available for free online from NLM). Nor was it the 
most needed database.  1) The data was free, and 2) the medical schools 
were/are powerful in the overall UC community.

Within a few years, that database was getting searched as frequently as 
the online catalog. Yes, people were doing as many searches in Medline 
as they were in the library catalog. Now it isn't possible that suddenly 
everyone at UC became a medical student or a biochem researcher. I 
imagine that if you did a study of doctoral dissertations issued during 
the 10-year period between about 1986 and 1996, you'd find that there 
are in inordinate number of citations that could have come from Medline, 
pretty much regardless of the topic of the dissertation. As a matter of 
fact, finding those citations in dissertations from departments like 
music and architecture would be a fun quest.

Some people at the then Division of Library Automation read this as a 
great success story. Me, it gave me stomach aches. We were changing the 
nature of the information that was being used for research, and 
therefore were changing the nature of that research. Not consciously, 
and not necessarily in a rational way. I had one of those horrid "sense 
of responsibility" feelings -- like when you touch something in a store 
and a shelf collapses two rows over. Yes, I felt guilty for making some 
data "too available", and was greatly relieved when we loaded up a host 
of other databases in other disciplines.

To me this is an obvious fact of our information world, yet one that I 
have not seen studied in any depth.

kc

Peter Morville wrote:

>I've written a new article about Authority...
>
>http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php
>
>...that folks on this list may enjoy. Just don't show it to any
>old-fashioned librarians :-)
>
>
>Peter Morville
>President, Semantic Studios
>http://semanticstudios.com
>http://findability.org
>
>
>
>
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>Web4lib at webjunction.org
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>  
>

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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