On 09/05/2012 21:18, john g marr wrote:
<snip>
> On Wed, 9 May 2012, Laval Hunsucker wrote:
>
>> James Weinheimer wrote :
>>
>>> A search for "ebooks" has www.ebooks.com come up second to
>>> Project Gutenberg.
>>
>> Now that rather depends, doesn't it, on ( i.a. ) the who and when
>> and from where of the search?
>
> True, but it is also indicative of the fact that search results (like
> everything else, including customers and searchers) can be manipulated
> from a number of directions for individual advantage. The question
> then becomes how to manipulate manipulation to become egalitarian.
>
>>> Reward and punishment should not be part of the library's tools.
>
>> Possibly not, but they always have been, and I don't know how they
>> can be eliminated.
>
> Your comment is significant in placing emphasis on static assumptions
> and personal knowledge. We should instead be consistently questioning
> stasis and taking the "possibly" corrupting presence of reward and
> punishment systems as evidence of a need to explore how they can be
> supplanted by egalitarian (I'm starting to like that word)
> collaborative tools.
</snip>
Interesting ideas. Laval's comment that each person sees search results
that are individually personalized (based also on ip address) is
absolutely correct and only emphasizes the problem. My intention was to
focus on the library tools that try to ensure reliable results over the
disputable terms "better" or "more useful". "Reliable" means an entire
raft of things, from being able to find the resources I found last week,
and find them in the same ways I found them back then, to making sure
that the items still exist so that they can be found in the first place.
For dynamic sites, perhaps the site will look different and even have
different information, but that is another task. Searchers, I think,
need to be assured that they can examine materials that they saw a few
weeks ago or a few years ago. This should be a minimum. It's difficult
enough now, but with "improvements" such as Google Penguin and Panda, it
could be made so complex as to render it practically impossible. I
didn't mention that everyone merely assumes that Google's motto "Don't
be evil" is followed today, and will be in the future, because this
could certainly be very evil.
I don't know if I would agree that "reward" and "punishment" are part of
the library's tools, except for punishing the searchers who have to know
and follow the obsolete methods of how to search the catalogs, indexes,
and other kinds of bibliographic tools if they want to find things
effectively. The practice of cataloging certainly attempts to treat all
resources in an egalitarian manner (although I confess that I always
sort of zoned out when it came to semiotics texts!). Minimal level
cataloging decisions could be seen as "punishment" although I see it
more as a lack of adequate resources. But, perhaps these two ideas are
more closely connected than I imagine.
Selection could realistically be called "reward" and "punishment" but
that is also mostly due to lack of resources. Most selectors would
gladly get many more materials for their patrons if they had more money,
space, and staff. Reference could definitely punish some publications
since reference librarians can send people to other resources and say
negative things about specific ones. And yet, this can also be
considered "professional opinion". In any case, this should result in
very little harm for the authors and publishers of the resource,
especially in comparison with Google's lowering them in the results
list, often going to second or third pages, when they are effectively in
limbo.
--
*James Weinheimer* weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
*First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
*Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
*Cataloging Matters Podcasts*
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/p/cataloging-matters-podcasts.html
Received on Thu May 10 2012 - 08:35:04 EDT