A quibble and an invitation to lynch me.
> * identification of the authoritativeness of sources,
I'm not so sure how important this is for *scholars*. Put bluntly,
authoritativeness is a chumps' game. It's what undergrads substitute
for knowledge, training and judgment. It's a sometimes dangerous
shortcut to knowledge, not the road itself.
A classics scholar confronted with an article on Alexander does not
think about how "authoritative" the article is. *They're* the
authority; they think about how true, smart, well-argued or useful it
is! You'd only care about "authority" if you were fishing in some
alien field—looking into dates of Arabic manuscripts or needing some
information on crop rotation.
It strikes me that librarians are so interested in "authority"
because, excepting topic-specialists at an academic library, they are
perpetually in the position of the undergraduate. They must collect
and recommend resources without having a scholars knowledge of them.
They are masters of the shortcut, not the road.
To do this, they master, sharpen and polish essentially
extra-scholarly tools for finding materials—subject headings, complex
fielded searching, reading the reviews not the books, extensive
knowledge of well-regarded indexes and encyclopedic works, etc.
Ultimately, I think we have two models here. A librarian—and librarian
tools—are good at knowing how to find something out. That is always
and forever different from *knowing something*.
Google has a closer relationship to that latter goal. By considering
data over metadata, and looking at the relationships between data in
ways that match the "pedigree," it digs past the "finding" into the
"knowing." But it does it very imperfectly and imprecisely.
Tim
Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 12:10:20 EST