Hardly and hard. Was: RE: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[Dempsey,Lorcan]

 mmm.. I like this:

"Information that's hard to find will remain information that's hardly
found"

I immediately thought of other formulations patterned after this one ...

"systems that are hard to use are hardly used"
"books that are hard to read are hardly read"


Lorcan

Lorcan Dempsey [http://orweblog.oclc.org] 
OCLC Research  [http://www.oclc.org/research/]

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Peter Morville
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 2:14 PM
To: 'Karen Coyle'; web4lib
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

Thanks for surfacing this important point Karen. Information that's hard
to find will remain information that's hardly found. And, as
evidence-based studies have shown (see below), even within the realm of
scholarly research, articles that are freely available online, and
therefore more findable, are much more highly cited...which to me,
suggests an important link between findability and authority. The
scholarly researchers that are most commonly cited tend to have the most
authority within academia.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kaantelm/do_open_access_CRL.pdf

Cheers!


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com
http://findability.org



-----Original Message-----
From: Karen Coyle [mailto:kcoyle at kcoyle.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:20 PM
To: Peter Morville
Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

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...


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