Tim Spalding wrote:
> 2. Wikipedia probably needs to have a single, unique name for each
> article. Search systems don't need that. Google certainly doesn't. It
> doesn't care whether you call it Nat Turner's Rebellion or the
> Southhampton Insurrection. There's no reason library catalogs need to
> either. The explanation lies in the intellectual constraints of
> physical catalog cards being senselessly carried forward to a
> unconstrained, digital reality.
Could you clarify this? Are you saying that library catalogs do not need any authority control just as in Google?
Is it still necessary to be able to retrieve "all" works about Nat Turner's Rebellion, no matter how an author happened to name it, but the system must allow for a multiplicity of names? (Note that "all" is in quotation marks here, which according to current guidelines means it is limited to 20% or more of a text) Or do you think that a Google-type text search for different variants of the words "nat turner's rebellion" is sufficient?
If somebody types in "Nat Turner's Rebellion" what do they think they are looking at? In my experience, they think, quite logically, that they are looking at the items about Nat Turner's Rebellion, when they are not. They are looking at a more or less random subset. Therefore, these people only *believe* they are seeing the items about Nat Turner's rebellion. The same thing happens with "Leo Tolstoy," or any concept you can think of.
This doesn't mean that people are stupid--it just means that the difference between conceptual searching and textual searching is very subtle, but very important. It's not something that you can grasp in 5 seconds, and is better demonstrated than explained. But I have seen that once people understand the difference, they begin to look at Google quite differently.
Or are you saying that the organizing function of the catalog, i.e. where catalogers work to make sure that *all* works about Nat Turner's Rebellion are collocated together, no matter what the words are that describe it, in any language, any time period, etc., is no longer necessary?
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue May 05 2009 - 03:37:12 EDT