KGS asserts...
>> Make the system friendlier, spend less money on hand-hewn metadata
>> and more on books and services, etc.
Hand-hewn metadata wouldn't seem so pointless if current systems did a
better job of displaying it and making it available for use. That seems
to be a consistent frustration of current systems -- they bury *really*
useful things like subject tracings where almost nobody can find them.
Just a librarian's concern? Hah! One of the most common user tasks is
to find something about a topic -- precisely what subject headings are
designed for. And generating those headings is not a task that can be
effectively automated; at least not until we teach computers to read and
comprehend text.
So *use* that expensive metadata! Shove an effective subject browse in
somebody's face so they can't miss it. Put a big fat "more like this
one" button on every record that's returned. These are things that
aren't that hard (or computationally expensive) to do. Now that we're
doing a better job of both leaning on our vendors and building our own
systems, we should make sure we're getting as much leverage out of our
*existing* tools as we can.
Ed Sperr
Digital Services Consultant
NELINET, Inc.
153 Cordaville Rd. Suite 200 Southborough, MA
(508) 597-1931 | (800) 635-4638 x1931
http://marginalist.blogsome.com
Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 10:31:23 EDT