[ARSCLIST] Was Registry of Digital Masters now, more about organization of information

[Karl Miller <lyaa071@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, steven c wrote:

> Nevertheless, information which has not been enumerated and catalogued is
> for all practical purposes worthless. Imagine a dictionary in which the
> words were listed in random order!

Which brings up my point about cataloging. I believe that the exponential
growth of information is such that the creation of information has
completely outpaced our ability to catalog it, especially when we rely so
heavily on the outmoded Euclidean linearity of systems like MARC.

A dictionary does not need to store words in alpha order. What we do need
is a search algorithm(s) which will allow us to retrieve words in some
hierarchtical manner which provides us with meaning. That meaning can vary
at any given moment in time, subject to our particular need of that
moment. I might need my "dictionary" or my word reference source to
function as a thesaurus, or perhaps a multilingual dictionary, or a
lexicon, or a guide to famous quotes, or a guide to the origin of a
particular word.

I believe that this notion of navigation is more fundamental to the
digital world than the notion of bibliographic control or cataloging. My
thesis has been that information needs to speak for itself. It seems to
me, that to do otherwise is both inefficient and limiting.

I like to think about the possibilities of having the bulk of the
published and unpublished writing ever done, digitized as machine readable
text. The question then comes to mind, how would one make use of this
world of information? It seems to me that if we think of it in terms of
cataloged books, we limit the potential use of that information. These
days, we seem concerned over quantity of information we might retrieve in
a search. However, I believe that the end user needs to be more "savy"
when it comes to the logic they apply to a search, and that search engines
need to be more intelligent.

We seem concerned that a search engine might exclude valuable information,
however, I believe that cataloging, by its very nature, excludes more than
it includes.

Karl