Thanks for the impassioned reply!
I agree with much of what you say, and hope I didn't give the impression
that I completely agree with Mr. Burke.
That said, I think some of the below criticism is rather harsh. I'll
admit that the rhetoric in Burke's essay is over the top, but I also
think that he makes some valid points if you can look past the
exaggerations and generalizations.
While Amazon is certainly no resource discovery panacea, features like
TOCs, snippets of full text, "statistically improbable phrases", and
even "customers who bought this" and "explore similar" are very useful
in certain contexts. I'd certainly posit that it makes browsing and
serendipitous discover easier. It speaks more to early stages of
research: refining topics, preliminary subject exploration, and initial
lit reviews, which should usually be followed up by more rigorous
research. My primary point was that, I don't think the efficacy of a
particular tool - be it a catalog, Amazon, or Technorati - should be a
factor in determining the scholarly worth or academic rigor of a
particular information need.
-Corey
Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
> At 08:40 PM 5/30/2007, Corey wrote:
> >I found this incredibly interesting:
>> http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma12004.html
>
> Lots of heat but no light.
>
> He's claiming Amazon is better than the catalog? Oh, give me a break
> - Amazon doesn't even have the first clue about basic authority
> control - my book is right there with those of plenty of other
> similarly named authors. There's nothing I can do to limit it. In
> fact, when you click on a specific author name, it gets even *worse*
> - showing the results of a search for "Michael" AND "Fitzgerald", for
> example, which could (and does) mean "James Patterson, Alton
> Fitzgerald White, and Michael Cumpstey" among nearly 200 totally
> unrelated results. If this fellow doesn't understand something as
> basic as that, is there really any compelling reason to take his
> arguments all that seriously?
>
> LSCH "long ago slid into uselessness" - define useless, please. He
> doesn't understand the concept of assigning the most specific
> appropriate subject heading either. But he says Amazon's subjects are
> no better. I think the Endeca projects have shown conclusively that
> there is plenty of usefulness in LCSH.
>
> "Exotic combinations of keywords and authors" - you want specific,
> you need to be specific.
>
> And get this - oh my heavens, he actually uses the bibliographies in
> books to find *other related sources*! Can you believe it? What the
> hell did he think they were *put* there for? Now I'm starting to tire
> of his off-the-cuff hyperbole.
>
> So he's having trouble keeping up with what's being published - seems
> to me that there are plenty of journals that maintain excellent
> "recently published" lists. I can't speak for the system at
> Swarthmore, but I've seen plenty of evidence that librarians and
> bibliographers put together webpages for just such a purpose. Has he
> even bothered to ask a librarian? What does he think *they* were put
> there for?
>
> Actually, never mind - what is this?
>
> http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/cgi-bin/newbooks/newbook_choose.pl
>
> He could even get an RSS feed of it. Looks pretty darn useful to me.
> This article was written in 2004. I hope he isn't still ranting about
> the lack of such a resource. Amazing that with such flawed
> foundations this guy is getting any attention.
>
> This over-the-top stuff ("burn the catalog"; "utterly erase our
> existing academic catalogs") just doesn't hold water. As far as I am
> concerned, he needs a copy of the Mann book and a stern talking-to
> from the humanities reference librarian. If it were up to me, I'd ask
> for a written apology to the entire Swarthmore library system.
>
> Mike
>
>
> mike at jazzdiscography.com
> www.jazzdiscography.com
--
Corey A Harper
Metadata Services Librarian
Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
212.998.2479
corey.harper_at_nyu.edu
Received on Wed May 30 2007 - 20:24:49 EDT