Tim, this isn't a very good analogy. Most pizza joints don't have
500k-2M+ different kinds of pizzas.
The problem with this approach is exactly the example you point out.
Plymouth State's library does well with Google searches, but why the
hell is that useful to me in Georgia?
I suppose "IEEE Conference 1998 Georgia Tech" might get one closer,
but I honestly don't think exposing our vanilla OPACs are going to be
the path to much joy. There needs to be a different approach to this
problem because merely opening our catalogs up to Google reeks of
polishing the turd.
-Ross.
On 4/23/07, Tim Spalding <tim_at_librarything.com> wrote:
> 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 - 15:43:09 EDT