I am not sure if this is what John Mackenzie Owen and Simon Tanner were
thinking, but ...
There would be considerable advantage in having all the data in a union
catalogue like COPAC or OCLC indexed by a search engine like Altavista --
users of the search engine would then find themselves pointed to
non-electronic resources that they might find in libraries. And these
union catalogues are designned so that the same innfomation only appears
once, and so is only indexed once.
What might not make sense would be to have every library's OPAC
indexed, because many books would be held by many libraries, and thus you
might get swamped by the same information repeated many times.
Giles
#### ## Giles Martin
####### #### Quality Control Section
################# University of Newcastle Libraries
#################### New South Wales, Australia
###################* E-mail: [log in to unmask]
##### ## ### Phone: +61 49 215 828 (International)
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The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together
-- All's Well That Ends Well, IV.iii.98-99
On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Nigel Gilbert wrote:
> At 2:03 pm +0100 1/7/97, John Mackenzie Owen wrote:
....
> >Simon Tanner is of course right in saying that it does not make
> >sense to include all items from opacs in search engines.
>
> Could someone explain why "Simon Tanner is of course right"? It can't
> simply be a question of scale, since Alta Vista (for example) already
> indexes several orders of magnitude more text than OPACS are likely to
> contain.
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