Owen Stevens said: "I can't help but think that we could be a bit more constructive as a community here."
I think it's important to take a critical look at such projects, pointing out the positives and negatives. I think their mission is admirable: "...to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge." Only 24% of the texts are in English, which is good, since there are already a lot of scanning projects doing English language texts. (By the way, 65% of the texts are Chinese language).
But as far as I can tell, search capabilities leave a lot to be desired.
Anyway, enough about the UDL...
Bernie Sloan
"Stephens, Owen" <o.stephens_at_IMPERIAL.AC.UK> wrote:
>
> It's difficult to imagine this working with the Universal
> Library. That resource has such primitive searching
> capabilities...almost as if building the collection was top
> priority, without much thought given to how to access what's
> in the collection.
>
Ummm... not wanting to be overly picky here - but surely building the
collection has to take priority over access?
I can't help but think that we could be a bit more constructive as a
community here (unless the above comment is intended to be facetious,
in which case apologies for being overly sensitive?). What are we doing
to make the texts in the Universal Library findable? Also, not that
certainly to some extent it is searchable via Google - making it more
accessible to most of the general population than any traditional
library catalogue - even given caveats about the limitations of this
type of retrieval.
If the above seems slightly bad tempered given the time of year, put it
down to me needing a holiday :)
Owen
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Received on Tue Dec 18 2007 - 12:13:23 EST