On 8/8/07, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> We DO need to provide tools for expert researchers (even if that only
> includes librarians) _as well as_ novice users un-interested in learning
> sophisticated tools. I don't think _either one_ can come at the expense
> of the other. (Which isn't exactly what Mann said, but it's what I take
> from it).
I think part of the problem here is that you state they are two
different things. They don't need to be.
We have this great story here about this little old lady academic
specialist reference librarian (bun, gray dress, strict, the whole
shebang!) who loved her meta data fields search. She was introduced to
a funky Lucene, and she hated it. After a while, though, when she got
to grips with relevance ranking bringing a little bit more results
than she expected but still held the good stuff at the top, she hated
her old tool and wouldn't go back. (Others have a better summary of
this one, I'm sure)
By thinking we need specialist tools that can't be generalist tools
too, we dig ourselves further down in the bog.
Regards,
Alex
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Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 19:09:38 EDT