On Apr 6, 2016, at 12:44 PM, Jason Bengtson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> This is librarians fighting a PR battle we can't win. I doubt most people
> care about these assertions, and I certainly don't think they stand a
> chance of swaying anyone. This is like the old "librarians need to promote
> themselves better" chestnut. Losing strategies, in my opinion. Rather than
> trying to refight a battle with search technology that search technology
> has already won, libraries and librarians need to reinvent the technology
> and themselves. Semantic technologies, in particular, provide Information
> Science with extraordinary avenues for reinvention. We need to make search
> more effective and approachable, rather than wagging our finger at people
> who we think aren't searching "correctly". In the short term, data provides
> powerful opportunities. And it isn't all about writing code or wrangling
> data . . . informatics, metadata, systematic reviews, all of these are
> fertile ground for additional development. Digitization projects and other
> efforts to make special collections materials broadly accessible are
> exciting stuff, as are the developing technologies that support those
> efforts. We should be seizing the argument and shaping it, rather than
> trying to invent new bromides to support a losing fight.


+1

I wholeheartedly concur. IMHO, the problem to solve now-a-days does not surround search because everybody can find plenty of stuff, and the stuff is usually more than satisfactory. Instead, I think the problem to solve surrounds assisting the reader in using & understanding the stuff they find. [1] “Now that I’ve done the ‘perfect’ search and downloaded the subsequent 200 articles from JSTOR, how — given my limited resources —- do I read and comprehend what they say? Moreover, how do I compare & contrast what the articles purport with the things I already know?” Text mining (a type of semantic technology) is an applicable tool here, but then again, “Whenever you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail."

[1] an essay elaborating on the idea of use & understand - http://infomotions.com/blog/2011/09/dpla/

—
Eric Lease Morgan
Artist- And Librarian-At-Large