Yeah, I have to disagree. The chaos is called the web. And more data
doesn't make it work worse; it makes it work *better*.
There are already millions of pages about any book. Google comes up
with a pretty good guess at the valuable ones—Wikipedia, Amazon,
publisher, author, Abe and so forth—often LibraryThing. Then come
rehashes of Amazon data. Libraries are nowhere because Google doesn't
see them.
Contra the "chaos" idea, you can even Google up pepperoni pizza in
your town, although there are more pizzerias in the world than
libraries and they all have their own pages—the Functional
Requirements for Pizzagraphic Records having never taken hold. Even if
my local pizza joints doesn't win for "pizza"—the pizza equivalent of
OCLC, PizzaHut, does—it does win for "Pizza Portland, ME."
Tim
On 4/23/07, Emily Lynema <emily_lynema_at_ncsu.edu> wrote:
> Tim,
>
> The idea of local catalogs being exposed to Google spidering has come up
> before. Ours is pretty much entirely spiderable, since you can do a
> blank search and just start paging, but we intentionally block Google. I
> don't think we ever came up very high in a general Google search, but we
> swamped the Google search results for ncsu.edu, which was bad news since
> our institution uses Google site search for its website search.
>
> Imagine the chaos if every library's holdings were exposed to Google.
> It'd be the FRBR problem on a gigantic scale, and the results would not
> be localized to the user's context, although Google Local might be able
> to help solve this problem. I think the community consensus in the past
> (and someone will correct me if I'm out of touch) has been that we
> should throw our weight and efforts behind exposing *one copy* (or a few
> copies) of the bibliographic information for a resource to Google and
> then figuring out how to localize that to a user's geographic context
> (aka, individual library). Thus the Open WorldCat project. Which has not
> been truly effective at getting library books up into the first page or
> two of Google results.
>
> I wonder if Google Book search could serve as our global union catalog
> indexed for Google web searching in the future?
>
> -emily
>
> Tim Spalding wrote:
> > Does anyone know of examples of a fully-spiderable OPAC?
> >
> > It's my contention that libraries would do well in Google and even
> > Google Local if they were spiderable. I've seen the Lamson Library
> > catalog do very well—tops in Google, even without mentioning Plymouth
> > State, but it gets a LOT of push from its association with WpOPAC.
> >
> > But I need some examples. Anyone?
> >
> > Tim
>
> --
> Emily Lynema
> Systems Librarian for Digital Projects
> Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
> 919-513-8031
> emily_lynema_at_ncsu.edu
>
Received on Mon Apr 23 2007 - 12:53:23 EDT