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.
This is chicken and egg of easily linkable/indexable/finable catalogs.
Citation analysis (of the Page Rank variety) won't work until we get
a good body of links, and we won't get a good body of links until
people realize they _can_ and _should_ link to our catalogs.
In academia, that means changing behavior to include more real links,
rather than simply author/title citations, and that will take time
(and a willingness of the content creators to make their own work
easily linkable/indexable). But we might have a little more success
in libraries, where we're regularly putting together bibliographies
on all manner of topics.
We'll eventually adjust our library/academic definition of 'citation'
to include links in web pages as web-native users bend the library to
their needs (the current generation of undergrads advancing through
the ranks will bring up the rear). And search engines (including some
we might build as an effort among libraries) will begin to make sense
of the new pool of bib data once it reaches critical mass.
Received on Tue Apr 24 2007 - 09:40:06 EDT