"N. C a r r o l l" wrote:
> ....As I came to realize in meeting crackerjack
> information science folks, the card catalog was just the beginning
> of search, because at a good library, the reference librarian *is*
> the thesaurus, making the bridge between the rigidity of the catalog,
> and the vague, unformed hollow in the searcher's knowledge.
>
> Or, if you will: making the bridge between concept and hierarchy.
I was always astonished at how often a librarian was able to translate
my typically-
uniformed query into search terms that produced highly useful results --
both in my
early years when card catalogs were all there was, and even much later
with computerized
search engines.
It's one reason for my vision of a human-mediated FAQ tool. Where the
computer
responds to my query with what IT thinks, I reply "that sucks", after
which an
ontologist looks over the query and then translates it -- in a way that
educates me
and the computer at the same time, so that is then able to answer one
more uninformed
query than it was previously able to do.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Oct 09 2001 - 21:54:20 PDT