At 05:10 PM 10/1/00 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>Eric is a technical expert here and I am not. So there may be something
>I am not seeing or understanding, but it seems to me that the idea that
>google itself, searching web-wide, is any sort of a solution for
>researchers who want to search all and only the refereed journal
>literature, is erroneous.
You are obviously not the only one who feels this way. The Digital Library
Federation has been working on a project, based in part on the work
of the Open Archives Initiative, that would make metadata about academic
resources available for harvesting, and allow for the development of new
services more tailored to the academic community (like search services that
only hunt peer-reviewed literature). See
http://www.clir.org/diglib/architectures/mdharvest.htm
for a brief discussion of the project.
I think the WWW has made it clear that librarians actually are providing
a valuable service in selecting what materials are included within a library.
General purpose search engines like Google are great for some
purposes, even some academic purposes, but the time has come to abandon
the notion that one-size-fits-all search engines can provide the best service
to all user communities. We need the technological hooks in place to allow
the development of services more targeted to particular groups, and an
essential
part of that is providing those creating and using new services with the
information
they need to decide whether a resource is potentially valuable or not.
Jerome "Not the Dead Playwright" McDonough
jerome.mcdonough_at_nyu.edu
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT