Well, Nigel Gilbert is of course right ;-) I am not automatically correct
in my comments and I welcome the suggestion that scale or volume of
information indexed is not the issue.  I have to say that the thoughts of
Giles Martin are closer to my heart.

Consider if the library catalogue details of every library (public or
academic) were available via search engine results.  The library world
would have to seriously re-engineer their data to show more information
than present (not necessarily a bad thing in itself, just an issue to be
faced).  Current OPAC's assume at least a little bit of knowledge - like
what is the library name and location that you are searching.  

When I was System Manager at Loughborough University and our WebOPAC was in
its early test stage, the page got picked up by the Yellow Pages internet
search engine.  It was posted in their UK, Libraries selection as "The
Library Catalogue" with no further information.  As it was a development
OPAC there were no fancy title screens or other onscreen detailed
information.  Anyone searching Yellow Pages could get a completely
erroroneous idea that they would be searching the whole UK's libraries or
the British Library or whatever if they attached to that site.  The
completed WebOPAC at Loughborough obviously rectifies this problem, but it
highlights the issue.

Now, consider the problems if the search engine takes you direct to the
bibliographic record.  Much more information would need to be displayed to
show even the basics of location and access.  Also, I think the repitition
of records describing the same work held at many, many libraries would
require that the Library location appearing somewhere in the search results
to avoid the searcher getting totally annoyed that every time they access
the record for the "The English Patient" it is in a library at the other
end of the country.  Now the enlightened searcher can narrow their search
to specific geographic locations. But when I start to use phrases like
"narrow their search" I start worrying about the levels of enlightenment in
the average searcher :-)

Regards,
	Simon


At 10:12 02/07/97 +1000, Giles S Martin wrote:
>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

<SNIP>

>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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Simon Tanner                                    Email:	[log in to unmask]
Digitisation Consultant                         Phone:	01727 813664
Higher Education Digitisation Service           Fax:  	01727 813649
University of Hertfordshire                     Web:	hedc.herts.ac.uk


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