On 4/6/16 4:04 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> Instead, I think the problem to solve surrounds assisting the reader in using & understanding the stuff they find.

I'd like to see innovation a step before find, but I think in a sense 
we're on the same wavelength. My take is that bibliographic information 
should be the end of a process, not the beginning. Before arriving at 
bib data, there's a lot of understanding and context that needs to be 
clarified. Some of this involves authors and subjects, but not as they 
are currently represented (mainly as text strings, and without 
relationships). I think that one of the main questions a user has at the 
catalog is "Where am I?" - where am I in the knowledge universe, where 
am I in the collection of this library?

Note that Google does not give users an answer to this question because 
there is no larger context, no inherent organization. Google does not do 
knowledge organization. Libraries "do" it, but our user interfaces 
ignore it (honestly, does anyone NOT think that the whole BT/NT 
relationship in LCSH is completely wasted in today's systems?).  Google 
searches "work" best on proper nouns that are nearly unique. You cannot 
do concept searches, and you cannot see relationships between concepts. 
It's great for named people, organizations and products, but not great 
for anything else.[1] Also, without the links that fuel pagerank, the 
ranking is very unsatisfactory - cf. Google Book searches, which are 
often very unsatisfying -- and face it, if Google can't make it work, 
what are the odds that we can? We do have knowledge organization 
potential; it's a bit out of date, it hasn't been made truly actionable, 
but it's there.

kc

[1] Except where there's a Wikipedia article using the concept term. 
Basically Wikipedia provides the only knowledge organization that Google has

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Karen Coyle
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