There are people out there who don’t see the point of cataloging or adding metadata to resources. They think that full text searching provides all the access anyone really needs.
As you likely know from the title of this blog, I beg to differ. But more than just differing, I like to offer examples where better description would clearly be helpful and timesaving to researchers.
For my work over at Free Government Information, I’ve set up several web alerts. A few are to try and flag new entries for directories we maintain and others are for mentions of FGI resources we’ve promoted.
I have one alert for mentions of “Second Life” in the .gov and .mil domains because we’re tracking US gov’t usage of virtual worlds. We neither endorse nor condemn such efforts. We’re just watching what’s being done. What I’ve been seeing lately haven’t been articles about the use of virtual environments but about how equipment and people have gotten a “second life” through reuse and/or rehabilitation. If we had a semantic web, I could chose to get alerts that only dealt with the virtual environment.
Another alert is for the phrase “best titles ever” because for awhile our set of weird and wacky government documents was pretty popular. These days, my alert simply pulls up mentions of video games and movies with odd titles. If we had good metadata in pages, I could narrow that down.
There could be better ways to formulate my alerts and just setting my thoughts down is helping me think what those might be. But that seems to be another case of having to fit ourselves to the technology rather than getting the technology to comprehend our information needs.
If I think of other examples, I’ll blog about them later.
Filed under: cataloging, fgi
