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Apr
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If you are attending the CiL 2008 conference and have interesting information to report about federated search, I would welcome your report as a guest post on this blog. Or, if you report on the conference in your own blog, as did the eclectic librarian blog, then let me know about it and I’ll post a link to your review.
Three of the Deep Web Technologies staff are there so I’ll try to twist their arms and see if I can get reports from them as well.
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One Response to "Reports from CiL 2008 conference?"
April 8th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Concerning the CRL article from November ’07, I think the reason librarians rate federated search results lower than faculty isn’t because faculty are the experts at finding what they want and need, but because librarians have a broader view. With all due respect to my faculty friends, faculty aren’t so different from students in this regard. Sure, federated search returns results that are relevant, eventually, but librarians know that while Academic Search Premier might give relevant articles on art history, it’s not the best source.
Which isn’t an argument against federated search. If anything it’s an argument for continuing to refine the speed and sorting of FS so that results can come back reflecting relevancy, with bells and whistles like limiting results to peer review, full text, and the presence of images.
Federated search is for now a contest of speed. As the technology develops, one hopes speed will become a given, and we can turn to the matter of sorting.
So the question of whom we’re trying to satisfy, faculty/students or librarians, is a bit like saying that if I go to my doctor and ask for this new medication I saw advertised in a commercial during 60 Minutes, my doc should just give me a scrip and not use her very expensive education to interview me and give me something that might do the job just as well, or even better, but without the television advertising. Librarians’ expertise is undervalued by this kind of thinking.
Alisa Whitt
PASCAL
http://pascalsc.org/