Hiya,
Not much disagreement from me here, but I did want to address one thing ;
Janet Hill <Janet.Hill_at_colorado.edu> wrote:
> They do, however (as is the case with any for-profit institution) have to
> look out for what is desired by the people who pay their bills, and when
> there is a conflict of some sort between an abstract "better for the user"
> and "better for our advertisers" (for example), they may need to opt for
> "better for our advertisers." Decisions about things like display order,
> display formatting, relevance ranking, etc. may be influenced by such
> business concerns.
> --- Which amounts to a targeted definition of what constitutes "better."
I need to remind people that this *also* applies to libraries. You are
not exempt from the scrutiny of society (through politics) who does -
indeed - pay your bills, pay for the buildings, and depreciate your
values. "Better for our patrons" will always be your pogrom, and there
is no real difference between this and the Google business model of
"better for our users who will return again and again to put
advertisers money in our pockets" except in terms of _time_ (time to
market, time for society to decide enough is enough, time to make a
political decision, time you've got left until retirement, time for
more funding to become available, time for people to return to good
service or products, etc.)
> The Library of Congress Working Group on the future of Bibliographic Control
> had a representative from Google among its members. It may be worth
> pondering that he noted that the continued work of the library community in
> providing subject analysis and metadata was a valuable resource for Google,
> which made Google's searches yield "better" results for the user than would
> be the case without the library-supplied data .... and which meant that
> Google didn't have to try to make plans to supply that data itself.
I say; let Google buy the library world. *Then* we'll get some serious
action, both in terms of "better" and in terms of "reliable". They'll
get better, and you'll get funding and to prove your worth forever.
Win-win. :)
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
--- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ----------------------------------------------
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Received on Wed Apr 28 2010 - 23:45:44 EDT