It's not social bookmarking, but as far as "But I'm thinking now about
the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by
librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links.  Something more
responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs.", well, that's almost
exactly what lii.org is.

http://lii.org

I happen to think that authority is dead dead dead as a method of measuring
information worth, but that's just me. :-)

Jason

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Cindy Harper <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative
> works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there.
> And I heard another presentation about social media this morning.  So I
> though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling
> over.
>
> Last week I sent this message to the "Suggestions and Ideas" forum at
> delicious.
>
> http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237&page=1#Item_0
> The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a
> network
> of faculty members.  Then have one login whose network included those
> users,
> and share that login so that lots of people could share that network.
> Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their
> delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks,
> but that doesn't scale up very well.
>
> Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching:  I started
> with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists.
> http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.html<http://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html>
> <http://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html>.
> I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could
> sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title.
> Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web,
> collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and
> books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic
> method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems
> might
> arise there).  But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into
> a
> lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists.  Now, you could rely
> on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of
> sites/cites.  But I thought you might want to differentiate between the
> source - .edus, librarys, etc.
>
> So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links
> from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs,
> scholarly publishers, etc.  I think you can limit by .edu in the
> linked-from
> in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at
> using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it.  But I'm thinking now about
> the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by
> librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links.  Something more
> responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs.
>
> Is anyone else thinking about these ideas?  or do you know of projects that
> approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative
> sources?
>
>
>
>
> Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
> Colgate University Libraries
> [log in to unmask]
> 315-228-7363
>



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