I _gladly_ stand corrected on many fronts!
Ian Macintosh suggested yesterday ....
"I think that it is much more likely that the metadata will not be
stored with the document at all and will most likely be put into
databases."
I agree with Ian but if we're going to pull this off there is an internal
(and maybe later, external) sales job. I'm suggesting the physical
presence of the standard we're developing in our public pages has
some weight on the sales front. There are many, many limitations
to what can actually be done with this embedded DC, but I think
the big issues we'll be wrestling with in 1999 are conceptual,
political, managerial and budgetary. I'd like to point to something
more visible when I'm trying to convince a cyberphobic policy
maker or an elected official that this is the way to go. A demo of a
'behind the screens' index or database isn't that effective for these
folks.
Peter Graham brought up the need for metadata management tools
and I agree with his point, but only if we succeed in selling DC in
the first place.
Verity (which is pricey) has been mentioned in some of these
posts, and so has SWISH-E, which is free. We've licensed
Verity's Search97 with the remote spiders and it will do everything
we need and more, but I also considered Netscape's Compass
server. I have an old note from Netscape that says they are still
allowing public libraries to use this product at no cost. Some
strings are attached but Compass includes a fair chunk of the
Verity product and it provides unlimited use of a spider and is meta
tag aware. We may not have a complete toolbox, but we've got
several, free and capable indexers in our bag of tricks if we want to
show what can be done. If we can't really demonstrate the utility of
DC the absence of management tools for it will be somewhat moot.
Perhaps this need to demonstrate is more of an issue for those of
us in government because we have some metadata baggage to
contend with, the US GILS, but I still sense that we (the larger 'we')
don't quite know how to organize ourselves to sell this....
Jim Weinheimer hits the nail right on its head......
"These are new issues for libraries and cataloging. We've never had
to compete like this before."
Did the collaborative research/demo session happen at DC6? If
yes, can anyone from that group jump into this search engine
discussion with some comments or ideas?
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