Re: FAST and GRIS
Karl Fast <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.infodesign.facetedclassification |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> libraries really have no money for such reform (in the US anyway), I sorta agree with this and I sorta don't. To my mind, the issue about things like LCSH is largely about political will. We've known for years that pre-coordinated subject headings a'la LCSH really suck in an online context. But in all those years we have done little to fix the problem. Meanwhile, despite the millions being pumped into digital libraries, we have failed to produce innovative and useful services like Amazon's new search-in-this-book feature. I think there is money; it's just allocated to different things (yet certainly the decisions about how to allocate this money must be excruciatingly difficult). There are fundamental problems that we've known about for years and, to my mind, it seems we've tried to ignore them, hoping they will go away, so that we can focus on New New Things like digital libraries (whatever they are) and reinventing the MARC wheel in XML. These are not necessarily bad projects--these initiatives have merit--but I think we are ignoring some deep infrastructure problems that need to be fixed. Apologies for venting, but the Amazon search-in-this-book feature has got me a bit riled. Don't get me wrong--I love the new feature. It's ingenious. It has rough edges but it's damned impressive for release 1.0. What bothers me is that in less than a decade, Amazon has built--from scratch--a vastly superior information retrieval system than anything libraries have achieved. This is something we've been working on for decades. We are getting beat at our own game on our home turf, and beaten badly. It's embarrassing. --karl ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Rent DVDs from home. Over 14,500 titles. Free Shipping & No Late Fees. Try Netflix for FREE! http://us.click.yahoo.com/ybSovB/hP.FAA/3jkFAA/0bmwlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ---------- Thanks for playing. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/