[143] in Information Retrieval
[ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU: FYI]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim McGovern)
Fri Feb 26 09:15:05 1993
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 09:14:45 EST
From: tjm@MIT.EDU (Tim McGovern)
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU
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From: ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: dlicc@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: FYI
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 08:38:23 EST
Thought you might be interested in this message that has been
following the thread of how to create the virtual library.
Greg
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Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 12:51:57 -0500
From: Susan Hockey <HOCKEY@zodiac.rutgers.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cni-bigideas@cni.org>
Subject: More on Creating the Virtual Library
Some comments on the responses to my message of 11 February.
Peter Graham (14 Feb) touched on something which seems to me to be
a crucial issue for scholarship, namely that libraries will have an
interest in providing tools as well as texts. I don't see how an
electronic text can be used without tools. The provision of an electronic
text implies some interference (for want of a better word) with its
intellectual content and so libraries are going to have to take some
responsibility for the intellectual content of a text as well as
for the description of that text. The challenge is to ensure that
the intellectual content serves the needs of the scholars who use
research libraries.
I have received several messages from people drawing my attention to
various algorithms for `semantic' indexing, based on weighted content
searches etc. I have also read papers on these approaches which I think
are more suitable for the `find me all the papers about topic x' query
than `look at the use of theme y in genre z'. But in any case, retrieval
is just one application of an electronic text. The texts in the virtual
library need to be multi-purpose and multi-functional.
I share a number of the concerns that have been raised about hypertext.
I think it does have a lot of potential, but from the scholar's perspective,
the most important issue is the creation of the links, which must be based
on some interpretation of the text, but who made this interpretation and why?
We need a method, embedded in the text, for documenting the scholarly
reasons why a particular link has been made and a method of allowing other
scholars to disagree with that interpretation. I also think that the
real potential of hypertext will only be seen when it becomes more widely
available across the network, rather than one local closed system.
Joe Ransdell rightly took issue with me (22 Feb) over the `simple string
search', arguing that he doesn't want other people's views embodied in
a concept index. I meant something a bit different from this. I would like
to see more experiments on the use of an electronic dictionary (computational
lexicon) in retrieval systems. The dictionary would act only as an aid to
whoever is performing the search. It would never make the scholarly decisions
for them.
I will continue to argue that many of the tools we have available today
fall short of tackling many scholarly concerns - at least in the humanities
which is the area I know best. I think it's time we emerged from the 30+
years of making the resources and research fit the software to making the
software tools fit the needs of research.
Susan Hockey
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
Rutgers and Princeton Universities
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