>> And your users are ... everyone, right? Even those who think they
>> might like the stuff you think you shouldn't collect, right?
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 23:23, Jan Szczepanski <jan.szczepanski_at_ub.gu.se> wrote:
> Absolutly not. We collect just for our professors, teachers and students and
> that's all.
Professors, teachers and students ... that's quite a lot of people
with a lot of traffic. And you are certain that you will always know
exactly what they're after at all times? I think I get the picture;
you think you know your users to a tee, and you want your catalog to
reflect your predefined constrained domain. I'm just not into that,
nor do I think it's healthy (or reasonable) for anyone, including your
professors, teachers and students.
>>> A
>>> place where you just find the best journals and the best books when
>>> you need it.
>> But libraries don't fall into that category either?
> They do.
I suspect you're deluding yourself. You can never, ever hope to
understand what your users want and need, nor what quality it should
be presented in. This is you guys trying to work out a constrained
domain that suits you and hopefully your users, but in terms of users,
you will never succeed. You'll get plenty of good hits, and
bucketloads of bad ones (you may know this, or you may never hear
about it).
>> As to your other comments about commercial and free resources, I'd
>> just point out that commercial entities are pushing their stuff onto
>> Google far more than they are pushing it onto you. :)
>>
>
> So what? As I said, as a gatekeeper and collection builder my role is to
> keep about 80-90%
> of the "stuff" away from the library shelves contrary to the big
> algorithmic machine.
As long as your users are happy with being limited while computers get
better at sorting through what's available, then sure. How will you
know, though?
Alex
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Received on Mon Mar 02 2009 - 19:42:45 EST