We’ve finished Alex Halavais’s provocative Search Engine Society in LIS 5433, and one of the unfinished discussions (so many interesting things, so little time!) was to use his concept of “search intellectuals” to compile a list of the “top 10 search intellectuals.”
Some of the names that were suggested:
Sergey Brin (Google)
Vint Cerf (Google)
Tom Costello (Cuil)
Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC)
Brenda Dervin (Ohio State)
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell)
Thomas Mann (Library of Congress)
Tefko Saracevic (Rutgers)
Jerry Yang (Yahoo)
I don’t think this is a very good list, but probably that’s because “search intellectual” is too fuzzy a category. I tried googling it, but that didn’t help either, rofl!!
I’ve been silently fuming about the increasing tendency of new books in our field to be so pricey that even I as a faculty member have to think twice about buying them, let alone urging students to buy them (yes, I mean you, Libraries Unlimited, Chandos Publishing, and Scarecrow, with the $45-$75 price tags for all those 300 pages-or-less paperbacks on topics that will date in six months or less!)
So I was totally delighted this month to see Marti Hearst’s brilliant new book from Cambridge University Press, Search User Interfaces, not only published at a very affordable $50 (and available right now at Amazon at an even more affordable $40) for over 400 pages in hardcover, but made available free online.
Thank you, thank you, Professor Hearst! I’m ordering my copy right now!
Oh, gosh, in all my previous posts about “looking for the Answer Man,” I completely forgot the Answer Men I actually know: “Virtual Dave” Lankes and Mike “The Big 6″ Eisenberg. And they’ve just come out with a planning proposal for a search engine to be called “RefEx” (for Reference Extract) that seems to build both on participatory librarianship and virtual reference.
Hm, could this be the answer to Google?
(Well, probably not, but I love these guys for trying!)
P.S. Dave, you’ve got some typos on that project webpage: what’s with, “Let’s use the natural intelligence of librarians to help identify credible sights.” Sites? Cites?
Sugar tends to make me giddy, so for those of you who may recall me saying yesterday morning that “Library 2.0 is so last year,” I have to admit that I was probably under the influence of the cupcake when I said that. (I stand by what I said about “Library School 2.0,” but you had to have been there to know what that was!)
Here’s Jon Blyberg’s Social OPAC 2.0 at the Darien public library in Connecticut to indicate that social networking in libraries is just getting started. It’s an “open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data” (Drupal installation). Take a look!
Since somebody else has now taken over the entertaining but entirely thankless job of creating fun fantasy questions that will never be asked in our comprehensive exams, that obviously frees me up to post other things that may be a bit more prosaic but potentially useful: such as a link to Tim Spalding of LibraryThing’s recent post on the ngc4lib listserv about the new Google Booksearch API.
For people in my Digital Collections class, this is well worth reading (and trying the tester Tim Spalding has set up at LibraryThing). In fact, those people in the class who take all of this (especially the use, re-use, and non-use of library metadata) seriously (and I hope they do!) should already be among the 2,000 subscribers that ngc4lib has. After all, this metadata is not only our intellectual infrastructure: it’s our intellectual capital.
Obviously the idea that “ready reference” is dead, as I suggested in my last post, is wrong. It’s just being privatized. I came across this mention of ChaCha in a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about new ways of cheating on exams, but presumably it has both more applications and implications than that.
(Oh, by the way: don’t bother to apply to become a ChaCha “guide.” Apparently the pay is “up to 20 cents per question successfully answered by top performers.” That actually makes library salaries look pretty decent….)
Dmitri Roussinov has an excellent article on the state of the art in question-answering systems that respond to natural-language queries in his “Beyond Keywords: Automated Question Answering on the Web” in the September issue of Communications of the ACM. The article moves beyond the typical “closed domain” (or “fixed corpus”) QA systems tested in TREC competitions to consider automated open domain (or “open corpus”) QA systems, most of which are still in research prototype stages. Roussinov concludes that open domain QA systems need to address the following technical challenges: scalability, credibility, and usability, and that the next ten years will see these challenges solved. So does this mean the end of mediated online “ready reference” in libraries, as Joe Janes has already remarked in another context?
So here’s our bonus ready reference question of the day: during what years respectively did Janes and Roussinov teach at Syracuse? (And how did you search for the answer, hmm?)
University of Michigan library maven John Wilkin has some very interesting thoughts about “hidden” digital collections and making them more accessible via Google. Intriguing that we’ve so quickly come to this Google-centric POV:
Interesting search function from Northwestern’s library: “search hidden collections.” (Though the title is a bit of a tease: the search results simply give a bit of information about each special collection, mostly regarding extent and provenance, so it’s really just “search for special collections.”)
As an aside, I also like this recent post from someone who is apparently a master’s level student at Syracuse on some of the issues of “hidden collections.” (In fact, I like the blog itself, as it seems to be full of the kind of practitioner-in-the-making reflections on the education and the profession that I am urging students here at Oklahoma to at least try. Though of course this does have its drawbacks— do you really want faculty members from other schools reading and recommending your blog, hmm?)
P.S. Oh, and what the heck, I might as well link to a useful post reflecting on learning strategies from a current OU student’s blog, just so that I’m not accused of still being obsessed with Syracuse after all this time….
Came across this through reading Jennifer Bowen’s excellent article on the eXtensible Catalog at the University of Rochester library in the June 2008 issue of Information Technology and Libraries. Should come in handy when we touch on information ethics, come the spring semester in LIS 5033….
Bowen also recommends that, rather than using the term “next-generation catalog,” we start using “discovery environment” or “discovery system.” (And that should come in handy for LIS 5990 “Digital Collections” this fall.)
And, speaking of ethics, given the existence of TurnItIn, I knew it was only a matter of time before we’d see this. So now let’s see how quickly a “CrossCheck” gets added to the tenure review process, and the lawsuits start!
