---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:57:43 -0600
From: Bill Thoen <[log in to unmask]>
To: Maps and Air Photo Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: NTIS and the Rebellion...

Actually, I suspect that continuing development of search engines
will do more to revolutionize how libraries index information
than the other way around.

What's obvious to me is that (in the government's case at least)
the public would be much better served to just have all the
federal information holdings dumped online, and let the search
engines sort them out. For over a year now even the somewhat
over-zealous Alta Vista engine can run circles around the best
that FGDC, FedWorld and other government "information hubs" can
do. Plus, with the recent entry of "smarter" engines like the
Google server (http://www.google.com) and efforts like the Clever
Project, I think that the government is wasting its time trying
to catalog all these papers assuming that everything must be
properly and fully indexed before being presented to the public.
It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful, y'know.

"All great enterprises should be self-supporting." said Henry
Thoreau, and if NTIS can't support itself due to public
non-demand, then it should either adapt to the times or pass into
history.

Adaptable information systems are where it's at now. I often hear
from librarians how difficult cataloging is because it's a moving
target and words alone make poor vectors into a information map.
Maybe in the paper-based days it was important to develop an
artificial language with precise keywords in authority files and
so on, but even if that's true, who's completely satisfied with
Dewey or the LOC guides?

Now with networked computers and active public feedback
(especially through the development of hub and authority sites
online) self-organizing semantic maps emerge that are
continuously tuned to the public's requests and more closely
match the current society's mental maps of information better
than a system anchored on a 19th century foundation. Progress is
made by the new methods of information organizing by growing,
adapting and evolving while in the other it seems more like it
has to be built from plans made by conscious architects. There's
nothing wrong with "architecture", and when done creatively
really improves an otherwise unplanned environment, but there's
an element to information that is so organic that I doubt that it
can always be improved by structures more like mortar and bricks
than fertilizer.

- Bill Thoen


> Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 10:31:32 -0700
> From: [log in to unmask]
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: NTIS (fwd)
>
>      VH: Finally! A voice of rebellion!  I couldn't agree more with your
>      assertion that in the rush to load the web, etc. with all these
>      papers, THE ALL IMPORTANT RETRIEVAL MECHANISMS ARE NOT IN PLACE! NOR
>      WILL THEY LIKELY EVER BE! (geez that felt good to say; sorry for all
>      the exclamation points... nothing like real tacky punctuation to get
>      the point across, eh?)  The idiotic bureaucrats don't seem to
>      understand this. I suggest we task these policy makers/bean counters
>      with a bibliography of say ten recent papers and have them find them
>      using all the common search engines.  This is what we - the
>      information retrieval specialists - will be stuck trying to do after
>      these federal bureaucrats blow off the information seekers with their
>      crackpot web-based (or whatever else is out there) repositories.
>      Can't thank you enough for bringing up this issue.
>
>      - Paul Leverenz
>        SIO Library