On Apr 6, 2016, at 12:44 PM, Jason Bengtson <j.bengtson...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is librarians fighting a PR battle we can't win. I doubt most people > care about these assertions, and I certainly don't think they stand a > chance of swaying anyone. This is like the old "librarians need to promote > themselves better" chestnut. Losing strategies, in my opinion. Rather than > trying to refight a battle with search technology that search technology > has already won, libraries and librarians need to reinvent the technology > and themselves. Semantic technologies, in particular, provide Information > Science with extraordinary avenues for reinvention. We need to make search > more effective and approachable, rather than wagging our finger at people > who we think aren't searching "correctly". In the short term, data provides > powerful opportunities. And it isn't all about writing code or wrangling > data . . . informatics, metadata, systematic reviews, all of these are > fertile ground for additional development. Digitization projects and other > efforts to make special collections materials broadly accessible are > exciting stuff, as are the developing technologies that support those > efforts. We should be seizing the argument and shaping it, rather than > trying to invent new bromides to support a losing fight. +1 I wholeheartedly concur. IMHO, the problem to solve now-a-days does not surround search because everybody can find plenty of stuff, and the stuff is usually more than satisfactory. Instead, I think the problem to solve surrounds assisting the reader in using & understanding the stuff they find. [1] “Now that I’ve done the ‘perfect’ search and downloaded the subsequent 200 articles from JSTOR, how — given my limited resources —- do I read and comprehend what they say? Moreover, how do I compare & contrast what the articles purport with the things I already know?” Text mining (a type of semantic technology) is an applicable tool here, but then again, “Whenever you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail." [1] an essay elaborating on the idea of use & understand - http://infomotions.com/blog/2011/09/dpla/ — Eric Lease Morgan Artist- And Librarian-At-Large
