> Really, I think a lot of our "we need a search like Google's" could be
> remedied if we just optimized our current OPACs to be crawlable.
It would be nice if it were that simple, but Google's algorithm (the entire strength of Google) is based on trillions of links to all different sites (the page with most links to it by the most linked = #1). There's nothing like that option in the library, and even Google's algorithm isn't so hot in Google Books.
Google's ranking by "relevance" (a semi-propagandistic term since it means something quite different from the normal sense of "relevance") would need to be recreated in the catalog, but how? By items most checked out (most popular?) By getting into publisher databases and trying to arrange by printing statistics? Or by retail statistics and best-sellers?
Or by "rate this book!" Let's say that Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra" got 200 votes while Kant's "Critique of the Pure Reason" only got 50. What would somebody conclude?!
While some of these tools are interesting, I'm not sure which ones really belong in a library....
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Mar 17 2009 - 11:24:18 EDT