Finding Books: Not Much Has Changed
December 1, 2014
Three or four years ago I described what I called “the book findability” problem. The audience was a group of confident executives trying to squeeze money from an old school commercial database model. Here’s how the commercial databases worked in 1979.
- Take content from published sources
- Create a bibliographic record, write or edit the abstract included with the source document
- Index it with no more than three to six index terms
- Digitize the result
- Charge a commercial information utility to make it available
- Get a share of the revenues.
That worked well until the first Web browser showed up and individuals and institutions began making information available online. There are a number of companies that still use variations of this old school business model. Examples include newspapers that charge a Web browser user for access to content to outfits like LexisNexis, Ebsco, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, and other outfits.
As libraries and individuals resist online fees, many of the old school outfits are going to have to come up with new business models. But adaptation will not be easy. Amazon is in the content business. Why buy a Cliff’s Notes-type summary when there are Amazon reviews? Why pay for news when a bit of sleuthing will turn up useful content from outfits like the United Nations or off the radar outfits like World News at www.wn.com? Tech information is going through a bit of an author revolt. While not on the level of protests in Hong Kong, a lot of information that used to be available in research libraries or from old school database providers is available online. At some point, peer reviewed journals and their charge the author business models will have to reinvent themselves. Even recruitment services like LinkedIn offer useful business information via Slideshare.com.
One black hole concerns finding out what books are available online. A former intelligence officer with darned good research skills was not able to locate a copy of my The New Landscape of Search. You can find it here for free.
I read “Location, Location: GPS in the Medieval Library.” The use of coordinates to locate a book on a shelf or hanging from a wall anchored by a chain is not new to those who have fooled around with medieval manuscripts. Remember that I used to index medieval sermons in Latin as early as 1963.
What the write up triggered was the complete and utter failure of indexing services to make an attempt to locate, index, and provide a pointer to books regardless of form. The baloney about indexing “all” information is shown to be a toothless dragon. The failure of the Google method and the flaws of the Amazon, Library of Congress, and commercial database providers is evident.
Now back to the group of somewhat plump, red face confident wizards of commercial database expertise. The group found my suggestion laughable. No big deal. I try to avoid the Titanic type operations. I collected my check and hit the road.
There are domains of content that warrant better indexing. Books, unfortunately, is one set of content that makes me long for the approach that put knowledge in one place with a system that at least worked and could be supplemented by walking around and looking.
No such luck today.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2014
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One Response to “Finding Books: Not Much Has Changed”
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This is a hugely important commentary that will be replayed at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog tomorrow morning (today’s four posts are done). The problem is even worse when one looks at the additional complicating factors of material published in hard copy only (gray literature) in the deep web (not in full text and without a persistent URL), and in languages other than english. The standard finding is that 1% of written papers are processed; 1% of what NSA collects is processed; 1% of what a standard embassy or corporation collects is indexed and processed. We are are largely ignorant world, because the top down “because we know best” model is corrupt, ignorant, and divorced from the public interest.
Needed is a new open source everything model that breaks completely from the top down secrecy rule “we don’t need no stinkin’ accountability” of the West. I expect this model to emerge in south america, asia, and africa.