On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Cindy Harper 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.

[trimmed]

> 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?

I don't know of any projects that specifically do what you've mentioned, 
but for the last few years, we've been mulling over how to store various 
lists and catalogs so that we could present interesting intersections of 
them.

In my case, I deal with scientific catalogs, so it's stuff like "when was 
RHESSI observing the same area as TRACE?" or "When was there an X-class 
flare within 2 hours of a CME?" or even lack of intersections "When were 
there type-II radio bursts without a CME or flare within 6 hours?"

For the science catalogs, we specifically don't want to just make some 
sort of single ranking from each list, and it's not really easy to merge 
the catalogs into some form of union catalog as they're cataloging 
different concepts.

... and I think that there's use in library searches to keep the catalogs 
different, particularly when you're bringing up authority (which then gets 
to reputation, etc.).

I'm not sure how many other people out there would try to search for Hugo 
award winning novels that weren't on the New York Times best seller list, 
so it might not be as useful for general patron use ... unless you could 
give it your *own* catalog (AFI top 100 movies ... that I don't already 
own)


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Joe Hourcle
Solar Data Analysis Center
Goddard Space Flight Center