As one of the guys who's been most vocal about the "Google economy" I
have to admit some shame that many of these concerns are true. That
is, a book in northern New Hampshire is mostly useless to Ross in
Georgia.
_But_ I also believe that the current state of affairs is temporary
(which is almost tautological, sorry).
We need to think of our opacs as part of an ecosystem. That is,
making it easy to link to the catalog and index it is just the first
step. The next step is to make sure our catalogs link to (and direct
non-local users to) larger-scope services like WorldCat that can help
them find the resource in a local library. That way, links from
individual catalog pages will drive up the ranking of those large-
scope services.
There are problems, of course. Relatively few libraries are
represented in OCLC, and tastes too much like a monopoly for too many
people.
Still, this ecosystem will evolve.
It's worth remembering that Google's Page Rank came _after_ the web
had grown to include billions of pages and links. But for too long
the only place people could link to a book was at Amazon, so we don't
have a whole lot of data to work with and things will probably be
pear shaped while we figure it out (and build a body of links to bibs).
In the meantime, our continuing efforts to figure out editions and
works and manifestations will offer the juiciest fruit when applied
at the scale this ecosystem will require. And with all the editions
of a work pointing to the same work page on the large-scope catalog,
we'll start to bring some sanity to the mess.
Do we need to abolish the local OPAC? There are some good arguments
on both sides, but we do need to think of our OPACs' role in the
ecosystem (and we absolutely need to make them easier to manage, less
expensive to run, and more feature rich).
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
ph: 603-535-2256
On Apr 23, 2007, at 6:26 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> Well, if bib was exposed as it's own web page---then it _would_ be
> linkable. That's kind of what Tim is suggesting I think, if it were
> linkable, then people will link to it, then useful page ranks will be
> calculated.
>
> I'm not sure this works. For the reasons Ross mentions, just the shear
> number of records we have. Not only does each of our library have
> hundreds of thousands or millions of records, but many of our records
> all really represent the _same_ work. So if someone is meaning to link
> to the work, they have a lot to choose from, and the "google juice"
> gets
> distributed so much it's useless (or concentrated in the big ones,
> leaving everyone else out to dry).
>
> But okay, WorldCat wants to be 'the big one'--they want everyone to
> link
> to them as the authoritative, so the google juice points everyone to
> them, and then they will happily redirect to your local library---IF
> your local library pays them.
>
> Except, aside from the monopolistic concerns there, currently Google
> refuses to index every bib on worldcat.org because there are just too
> many! "open worldcat" is a subset of bibs that Google will index.
>
> I think that we have some unique problems here--the volume of our
> records being in fact just ONE of them, but a big one (searching for
> Pizza in Portland is like searching for a Library in Portland, not
> like
> searching for a copy of Dhalgren in Portland, unless like Ross
> suggests
> a pizza place has a half million kinds of pizza)--such that just
> "throw
> it at Google" is certainly not going to be a good solution. Now,
> certainly, for a variety of reasons, all of our _local_ bibs should
> ideally have persistent URLs suitable for 'spidering'. They don't
> now,
> that needs to be fixed. But I still remain skeptical that just
> putting
> all of our local bibs on Google can lead to much useful discovery. It
> might lead to something else interesting, it would be worth an
> experiment, but an experiment is what it would be.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>> The difficulty that I see with adding the contents of the library
>> catalogs is the page rank. It's kind of the same problem Google is
>> having with coming up with a ranking for its books database. Since
>> the
>> data in many library catalogs isn't linkable, there's no data to
>> use to
>> calculate the rank, just as there are not enough current links to
>> Google
>> books that would inform ranking. We could use library holdings as a
>> ranking characteristic -- basically, you query WorldCat to find
>> out how
>> many libraries own the book. That's pretty crude, requires a good
>> FRBR-ization of the titles, and is going to give us a very, very long
>> tail. (a large number of WorldCat records have only one holding
>> library
>> -- based on data about the Google 5 libraries:
>> http://dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html)
>>
>> Ranking is absolutely key. I gave up using Google desktop search
>> because
>> what I was looking for never showed up in the first 1-2 screens.
>>
>> kc
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> -----------------------------------
>> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
>> ph.: 510-540-7596
>> fx.: 510-848-3913
>> mo.: 510-435-8234
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>
> --
> Jonathan Rochkind
> Sr. Programmer/Analyst
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
> 410.516.8886
> rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Mon Apr 23 2007 - 17:46:55 EDT