[Web4lib] google & library catalogs

[Michael McCulley]

Great thread.. I like what Bill Drew did off of it.. and the Danish
subject-based experiments seem promising.

The Google Homework notion from Rich is Google's version of a "frontdoor"
pathway that works for them -- more users, more traffic, more ads delivered.
If such would indirectly aid libraries, students, or library patrons, that's
fine with Google. But, they didn't built it to help libraries ;). New
doorways and mash-ups are coming onstream daily; part of the hard part of
our work is keeping up with them, discovery (wheat from chaff) 

It's not an either/or mix coming.. Google will do Google things, and
OpenWorldCat will do their things..

Local libraries -- and that includes groups, consortia, geographic groups,
etc. -- will do their things with front-doors, portals, search mash-ups..
it's a fine thing to do, if you use the not either/or model to understand
what you are doing. You are providing "your patrons" with a better doorway,
entrypoint, platform. That's valuable, and always will be, IMHO.

We were working with geo-tagging and geo-coding content at AOL/Netscape when
I was there, and it's moved a bit further since then; but, there's still a
lot of work to be done in that area. If more content is geo-coded, some of
the meta-tools can harvested based upon geo-codes, and some of the
geography-based "hits" problems can be dealt with. That presupposes everyone
will use or encode with standardized geo-codes.

We can have more exploration of library catalog content, from overlaps like
NCSU's fine implementation, to crawled and re-purposed content. And, we can
work together with search engines and their companies and technologies to
ensure libraries and their content, expertise, subject-based resources are
"universally" available. 

To me, it's a win-win 21st Century. I still wish we had a better working,
regular, advisory and consultation relationship between our Library "world"
and Google (and add all the major search engines). It's a missing piece to
me. There is no direct dialog between libraries' associations/groups and the
major "finding/linking" indexer of the Internet. We have these informal,
one-sided debates amongst ourselves, and probably that and papers and
presentations trickle back like "grey literature" to the Internet Indexers.
But, we could do better with a better relationship and dialog, IMHO.

Best,
DrWeb

-- 
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb at san.rr.com
San Diego, CA 
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
 There's more than one way to skin a cat.  Get a sander!
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 6:29:35 PM 
 
>-----Original Message-----
>From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
>[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Drew, Bill
>Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:42 PM
>To: Ross Singer
>Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org; Jim Cody
>Subject: RE: [Web4lib] google & library catalogs
>
>I put up an experimental page where I search the open world cat domain.
>It is at:
>
>http://library.morrisville.edu/googlelibrarysearch.htm
>
>Wilfred (Bill) Drew
>E-mail: mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu
>AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4