via The Telegraph.
The British Library may be seeking “relevance” with this project, as libraries across the United Kingdom continue to be shut down, but Google’s goal is hardly that.
Back from ALISE last week, where I presented “Remodeling ‘Relevance Work for the LIS Curriculum’” with my wonderful colleague Connie Van Fleet. Got a few useful comments (most of the audience seemed a little bemused by why we would be putting all of these seemingly unrelated activities together in the first place), so it was useful from that perspective. (And now for the paper to explain more about why we did this!)
Really, really pleased about how the draft of “relevance work in the LIS curriculum” is shaping up, and looking forward to discussing it with my esteemed co-author this week. Even though this one may not make it into my tenure dossier, she thinks we’re onto something intriguing here.
*dances*
From Bjorland’s redefinition of relevance in the February 2010 issue of JASIST:
“Foskett’s view of relevance is close to the one suggested in the present article. Before I did so, he considered the literature of science studies and found here the basis for understanding ‘relevance.’ That relevance is not primarily a psychological concept, but a concept in the theory of knowledge (epistemology), a paradigm, something generally accepted in a community.”
An intelligence community, perhaps?
I’m going to ALISE in Boston next week, to talk about the differences and similarities between “superior reference skills” and “strategic relevance skills” for Danny Wallace’s business intelligence panel. (And, mainly, to eat at Legal Seafoods, though unfortunately I’ll be home again to start the new semester here in Tulsa long before Chowda Day on the 20th!)
Hm, didn’t know that relevance was patented by Microsoft! Weren’t the TREC crowd doing things like this 30 years ago? Let’s run a quick search on the term “prior art,” shall we, and see if we can find something relevant?
Hmm, I’d love to use Brian O’Connor’s new book, Doing Things With Information, as a text:
“The relationship between a person with a question and a source of information is complex. Indexing and abstracting often fail because too much emphasis is put on the mechanics of description and too little on what ought to be represented. Research literature suggests that inappropriate representation results in failed searches a significant number of times, perhaps even in a majority of cases. Doing Things with Information seeks to rectify this unfortunate situation by emphasizing methods of modeling and constructing appropriate representations of such questions and documents. Students in programs of information studies will find focal points for discussion about system design and refinement of existing systems. Librarians, scholars, and those who work within large document collections, whether paper or electronic, will find insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the access systems they use.”
My suspicion is that a text like this would throw a whole new light on library and information studies for people just starting the program…. in fact, maybe even better for people just finishing the program?
A little musing on the power of weak relevance today: my example being this story on how reading fiction may enhance social skills, found courtesy of blogger Jake Seliger at The Story’s Story, which I found while searching for a blog by Gabriel Zaid (which, sadly, I haven’t yet found), author of So Many Books (which everyone who hasn’t already read should read, even though I feel obliged to point out that Zaid’s own view pretty much represents the exact opposite of that suggestion!) So, anyway, here’s the blog of these University of Toronto researchers on “the psychology of fiction” for all you reader’s advisory folks, who might perhaps find it to be “strong relevance”….
Thanks to today’s braindump from Web4Lib (a great listserv for anyone interested in arguing about the future of libraries, by the way), I was pointed to this March 2008 article from Wired which mentions the new “vogue for human curation” (new?!) in the context of their round-up of mediated search engines (several of which were new to me, though none of them seem to be nearly as good as the average reference desk right at the moment. And, ironically, the first one mentioned, Brijit, has apparently already shut down due to money problems….)
Oh, and before I forget: a theory-related Unshelved cartoon!
Well, based solely on the results of my query on “What is null relevance?”, the Answer Man (the mighty artificial intelligence ultimately destined to replace reference librarians) won’t be emerging from PowerSet, the natural language search engine described in this Slate article, any time soon. On the other hand, standard reference search skills did help me in finding a highly relevant article on the topic by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh at Berkeley.
July 10 Update: however, my CI skills must be a little rusty, as I missed the announcement that Microsoft is acquiring PowerSet. It is devoutly to be wished that Microsoft does not in fact develop the Answer Man as its Google-killer. (Yes, librarians are currently a bit miffed with Google, but that’s another story….)
Oh, here’s another thing (bad pun intended) at least weakly relevant to this whole question of the “Answer Man”: Tim Spalding’s post from the ALA session this past Sunday on the Future of Cataloging….
