Karen,
Sorry, but I'm not buying your explanation. The king of "an unending graph of relationships" is Google, the subject of endless carping by librarians. Look at this thread. Google has been described as predatory, riding the backs of content providers, of only running an algorithm over text (And an OPAC does ~what~, pray tell?), etc. And Google's graph is not limited by physicality.
Now take a look at what librarians tend to suggest. They tend to want to use the same classification and subject heading tools that they've used for physical books. In one of your earlier posts you argued that Google doesn't actually organize information because they don't classify. But what makes a search engine like Google so powerful is that their, yes, algorithms, ignore the boundary of the information object and index the content itself.
So, yes, the organizational tools of librarianship were originally meant for physical libraries and not much else. So why do we want to apply them to another context, a context for which they were never intended? What would you use to build this unending graph?
Steve
On 08/03/13, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Stephen, I still disagree. The organization of the LIBRARY is the signature contribution. You can use the library without the catalog, and most users do. That said, the organization of the library has been limited in the past by its physicality. We should be able to go beyond this today, providing users with a map of topics that is an unending graph of relationships.
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> kc
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Received on Sat Aug 03 2013 - 10:46:22 EDT