Lars' comments plays into a long discussion I had with my wife last night and some discussion I have seen elsewhere regarding the whole topic of cataloging / OCLC / MARC records, etc.
Perhaps we need to rethink the entire concept of how people need to find and utilize this information. I don't have any answers now, I'm not even sure I can give the questions, but perhaps the "one page for every book" a la "the world's greatest card catalog" is a dinosaur that needs to be replaced in favor of "the world's greatest full text search engine with a vengeance." I'm thinking something in the flavor of a semantic search with categories or lists that help researchers zero in on their particular interest. Rather than putting an army of volunteers to work then, cleaning up this data base, we would rather spend our efforts refining and clarifying the most common search categories. Like I said, I don't even know the questions yet, I'm not looking for a bigger faster "Google" and certainly not a "Lycos" or "Yahoo Y! Sites" but something different. Perhaps this starts with a survey of how people view this resource, how they are using it now, and what they would like to do with it. John Rigdon >> OL's problem is the lack > of a clear vision and purpose. "One page for every book" > is one vision I've heard, but it doesn't solve any real > problem for me. Besides, there were lots of different > pages for each book, false duplicates, that it would take > ages to sort through and merge. > > > -- > Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) > Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
