Hiya,
Yup, have to agree with Jonathan here; primary sources are well and fine is
as much as they can be hard to find when searching for "world war i".
However, I doubt anyone looking for "world war i" at this junction in their
search even cares about primary sources. Or, put differently, every search
is a journey, the search queries change depending on what they find and
their level of investigation.
I sort of need to come back to something I've been thinking about over the
last little while. The golden ticket named LCSH sits at the centre of this
debate more often than we care to admit, and most searches - even from
hardcore librarians - is some variation of a faceted search, and because of
the way traditional search in library systems have worked, they are closed
searches, but I've seen prioritized open faceted searches become more
wide-spread over they years. However, the colour is no longer so golden
because more often than not it because they become constraints on that
journey, in open or closed systems both (pushing the result you're after so
far down the search results to be impossible to find).
This is, of course, all searching over metadata in the most logical way; is
or isn't some property of some record present, and does it or doesn't it
kinda look like X? I see very little effort (as resources go, not the want
nor the need) go into more sophisticated a) semantic searching, and b) new
metadata creation, and I'll give an example of both;
a) what resources are scholars using (so, depends on role-based systems,
although I'm sure someone is going to call out circulation data as some
hack around this) but rated as a dubious source (so, depends
on scholarly ratings and source targets), as opposed to what's available
through metadata alone
b) what subjects seems important in resources are trending downwards (so,
depends on circulation data) but where requests are steady or increasing
(so, depends on "other" ILS data)? This particular set up finds resources
to the right of the bell curve for trending subjects (which could be
further grouped by roles), as opposed to Google Trends which deals with
source metadata. (Notice that this could be split further between what
subjects we reach through LCSH, and analysis of the actual text which I
suspect will be very different; why not both if possible?)
I'm sure we all could rant for hours listing cool ways of looking at our
metadata in smarter ways, and exciting ways of merging that data with other
sets of data, and I suspect we all agree that we've all got terribly
limited resources, that we must cater to the middle ground with what we've
got, and so on. And this is true, but while limited as individual entities
it does not follow that the worlds library resources couldn't muster serene
greatness if the goals are properly understood and agreed upon by all.
Notice that my two examples cares not one bit on the quality of carefully
crafted cataloguers handiwork, but is all about meta metadata. As my
searching and needs increase, *that's* when that quality becomes more
important.
I'll put it differently; the quality of the meta data for Harry Potter is
less of a problem than it is for, say, "Letters of Giacomo Puccini" from
1931 (which, if you view the record of this tells very, very little about
the topics brushed over in the book, what operas covered (or indeed what
other bits of music included), what people dealt with, and so on. However,
I know it physically by "335, [1] p. : illus., 2 port. (incl. front.)
facsims. (incl. music) ; 23 cm." and looking at this, as a scholar, I'd be
hard-pressed to even find it in a library to see if it might be
interesting). Funny how
http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/9185950?q=subject%3A%22Hogwarts+School+of+Witchcraft+and+Wizardry+%28Imaginary+place%29+--+Juvenile+fiction.%22&c=book&sort=holdings+desc&_=1352418677071&versionId=45725146
has
pretty decent metadata, perhaps showing that popularity breeds better
metadata, a kind of corollary to library cataloguers everywhere.
Yeah, I know, classical problems of library meta data collections. I say;
put some more focus on that LCSH thing, because there's gold in there when
linked with something else, but you need to find it and use it better, and
understand the problem of faceted exclusion in juxtaposition to open
search. Or something.
I like Trove, though. Works really well.
Regards,
Alex
On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> On 11/8/2012 4:12 PM, James Weinheimer wrote:
>
>> I then go on to say that a search for "World War I" *cannot*--*by
>> definition*--find a very important type of resource. And that is:
>> anything from before 1938, i.e. before World War II took place. Nobody
>> called it World War I until there was World War II. Therefore, in a
>> full-text search for "world war i" it is impossible for there to be any
>> primary sources,
>>
>
> I know what you mean, and it's legit, but.... do a google search for
> "World War I Primary Sources."
>
> Of course, you get some, easily. Obviously it's because someone after
> 1938 (way after 1938) wrote a web page giving you access to WWI primary
> sources.
>
> But it's not because a cataloger or anyone else cataloged anything using a
> controlled vocabulary.
>
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Thu Nov 08 2012 - 18:57:16 EST