On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:03:43 -0400, Thomas Krichel <krichel_at_OPENLIB.ORG> wrote:
> James Weinheimer writes
>
>> But then push comes to shove, and our catalog records must be made useful in
>> the Google environment -- somehow.
>
> This technically trivial, all you have to do is
>
> (1) build a static HTML page for every item in the catalog, with your
> library details and the details about the item
>
> (2) have some pages that allow to navigate items, and that allow
> a crawler to find all of them.
>
> BTW, you may have more chances of local users finding the items
> with bing. I think bing has a lot more GeoIP intelligence built
> into it than Google.
I guess I wasn't clear in my original message. Sure, they can cobble a
system together, but it doesn't mean that people will use it. Let's face it:
our users are not in love with our current catalogs (that's part of what
this entire list is about), and throwing all of our records into Google
would surely result in a huge mess, much as the Language Log examples provide.
How would Google's "page rank" and "relevance ranking" work with our
records? How would our headings work? Like they do in our catalogs today? I
doubt if Google would want that.
Traditional catalog records were designed to be browsed in a card catalog or
even better, in a printed book catalog. They don't work very well in an
online environment, but this is basic web design and information architecture.
Today with XML and similar capabilities, we can do original things such as
in AquaBrowser, but I don't know if it works very well. While these
novelties are certainly "cool" and I applaud the effort, I personally find
it incomprehensible, but I admit that may be me.
I don't know what Google would come up with, but I am sure it would not look
much like our current library catalogs.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Fri Sep 11 2009 - 10:26:51 EDT