Quoting Ross Singer <rossfsinger_at_GMAIL.COM>:
>
> Does anybody bother to mine their course reading lists or reserves for
> discipline based relevance? This is basically what the project I work on
> (Talis' Aspire -- http://www.talisaspire.com/ </product_plug>) does. There
> is all kinds of semantic relevance embedded in the ways scholars actually
> use materials.
Absolutely. There are bibliographies all over the place if you look
for them. I've been waxing nostalgic over the (now gone) undergraduate
library that I used at UC Berkeley. You could have seen it either as a
giant bibliography, or a great collection of bibliographies. The UG
library held all of the "key works" in each field, so you could go to
the shelf in, say, the area of French history and get a quick picture
of the basic literature of that field.
This is also a response to folks who say that librarians shouldn't
"recommend" certain books, which is such hoooey. That entire library
was a careful selection of what matters in each discipline, definitely
a value judgment. Some other institution's undergrad library would
undoubtedly have been different in some areas, but either served as an
invaluable tool for anyone starting out in a new topic area. You could
have taken any one of those books from the shelf and know that what
you were reading had a high degree of relevance in that field. Do the
same thing on the shelves of the main library, with its 6 million
volumes, and you could end up going home with a book that no one in
the history department would ever recommend.
Yes, you can make the case for serendipity etc. But life is too short
to spend time reading the minor works before you read enough of the
major works on a topic to be conversant. This is was education is
about, and libraries support education, no? If not, we'd buy books by
the pound, not their content, and retrieve them based on peoples'
zodiac signs.
kc
>
> It's also very similar to my (unrealized) vision of the Communicat (
> http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/24).
>
> Certainly there are other possible ways to create some of these
> relationships (circ data, services like Ex Libris' bX, etc.).
>
> Yes, there is little possibility for a library to accomplish a
> bibliography-like experience on it's own. I think that's exactly the
> mindset we need to get out of, however.
>
> -Ross.
>> In the 21st century (heck, even in the 20th century), the point of the
> field of 'information retrieval', building systems to answer user queries,
> is trying to make a system that can start from a large corpus, and assemble
> what we could call a 'bibliography', a subset of that corpus matching the
> user's query. Matching on full text if we have it, matching on controlled
> vocabulary if we have it, etc.
>>
>> Of course, this assembled subset is not going to be as good as a human
> expert created bibliography. It's really disrespectful to call it a
> 'bibliography' at all, except by analogy.
>>
>> But the idea that there will be human expert maintained bibliographies
> created and kept up to date for every possible research topic a user may be
> interested in -- is simply a weird luddite fantasy.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Thu Aug 11 2011 - 21:19:28 EDT