Jim wrote:
> And I meant that
> searching "wwi" will get you primary documents *if* someone
> has tagged them in that way.
Yes - but that's true in a library catalogue as well of course - change
tagged to 'catalogued' of course, and only allow librarians to do this
;)
>
> In all, I think that it is difficult to say that three
> searches that all aim for the same concept, but where each
> one retrieves a different result could be called a concept
> search. It seems that by definition, a concept search should
> retrieve the same results.
>
OK - this is good, as it leads to a clear difference in definition. For
me, a concept search doesn't, by definition, retrieve the same results.
I'm not sure I have a pithy definition of a concept search
unfortunately, but I'm reasonably sure that I don't see consistency as
part of that definition (not to say consistency isn't nice).
> Additionally, perhaps if people point to the wikipedia page
> about Dostoyevsky using "dostoievski," that may work for the
> wikipedia page, but it still doesn't mean that by searching
> dostoievski, you will be finding what is available in Google
> about the Russian author.
>
This may well be true - but does it matter (a Friday afternoon question
if ever there was one)? Perhaps a more pertinent question is 'is it ever
going to be possible to find all available material on a topic given a
large body of available material?' - I would suggest that the answer to
this question is 'no' - so it becomes more an issue of doing the best
possible job. I don't know if Google does the 'best possible job' -
probably not in fact - but it does a reasonably good one for a large
number of people - and I suspect this is the best we can hope for.
I've been trying desparately to decide what this all means for libraries
(if anything), and although I keep getting glimmerings of ideas I don't
seem to be able to pin them down. However, a couple of bits of reading
seem relevant:
http://www.booksquare.com/quick-thoughts-on-book-search/ - which in turn
triggered:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/book_search_sho.html
Received on Fri Jan 04 2008 - 10:34:42 EST