[Web4lib] (Govt) Digitized resources, organization, and usability?

[Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D.]

Jenne,
   Very interesting.

   Could you comment further on the reasons you think Google produced a
partial save and what that implies?  I agree about the negative results of
digging more and deeper silos.  At least Google could still see enough web
material to provide some links into the material despite this -- what are
the (unobvious) circumstances in which that fails?

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Jennifer Heise <jenne.heise at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ladies & Gents,
>
> Am I alone in noticing that U.S. government created archives at the
> Smithsonian and the Library of Congress have become incredibly
> difficult to navigate? I recently went looking for Depression-era
> materials that I know are held at both institutions and provided on
> the web. I know, because it used to be relatively easy to find such
> materials.  After a good deal of browsing, I finally fell back on
> Googling and found a very buried page at the LOC, designed to show
> teacher resources, that points to a significant number of those
> resources.
>
> Unfortunately, what I found appeared to be the bad result of sincere
> librarianship. Each segment was in its own little silo, and cataloged
> very specifically according to the basic ideals of cataloging. As a
> result, the archetypal photo of the exhaused pea-picking migrant
> worker mother can be found several ways-- but it is in no way
> associated with the Depression. Materials from WPA projects are broken
> up into tiny subject collections, ranges for date searching go, for
> instance, from 1918-1940 or 1930-1960...  The extensive siloization of
> the material really makes this very painful.
>
> Is this the long-term fate for materials put online as part of online
> archives? How do we avoid this in materials we control
> -- Jenne Heise
>
>
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-- 
Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D., J.D.
Personal Cell: (352) 219-6592