On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Arthur Smith <apsmith_at_aps.org> wrote:
> There is, it seems to me, an unacknowledged non-dysfunctional purpose
> served by journal issues that would be difficult to satisfy with any
> search interface: non-duplication...Though perhaps that's what you were
> implying by "the power of online boolean search", the need for tracking
> what has previously been looked at (whether read or not) needs to be acknowledged.
Yes, simple de-duping (and tracking) of hits is a lot more
parsimonious than generating a parallel journal! (Co-appearance in a
joint issue is also a detectable condition.)
What people keep envisioning as journals and issues is all down to tags now,
bespoke tags, and tags generated (and stored on the fly) by smart, customized
search engines.
If google or amazon or ebay can remember what you've shopped for in the past,
for you preference profile, surely so should a smart OA search service!
Stevan
>
> Arthur Smith
>
> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>
>> On 5-Oct-09, at 8:49 PM, Klaus Graf wrote:
>>
>>> 2009/10/6 Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
>>>
>>>> (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated
>>>> articles; no
>>>> need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the articles plus good
>>>> boolean search power is all that's needed.
>>>
>>> I do not think that you can prescribe readers how to browse journal
>>> issues. There are lots of theme-issues where browsing makes sense.
>>
>> Then just retrieve all and only the entire theme-issue with a suitable
>> boolean descriptor...
>>
>> (You vastly underestimate the power of online boolean search over an
>> OA inverted full-text corpus -- and you also overestimate the
>> persistence of obsolete, dysfunctional habits, once more powerful
>> means become available. But the real reason all this prognostication
>> is missing the mark is the persistent absence of most of the target OA
>> full-text corpus. The latent power is not at all evident from the
>> arbitrary, sparse OA subset we have so far. Until the token drops and
>> we realize that the only thing standing between us and that full
>> corpus is author keystrokes -- and that all that is needed to inspire
>> those author keystrokes is Green OA self-archiving mandates from
>> universities and funders -- our imaginations will continue to fail,
>> and mislead us.)
>>
>>
>
Received on Tue Oct 06 2009 - 21:36:46 BST