Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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According to Thomas Mann, a Reference Librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, the answer is no. The program’s limitations make cataloging and classification even more important to researchers. Mann says that Google Print and keyword search mechanism, backed by the display of results in relevance ranked order, are designed and optimized for quick information seeking rather than scholarship. They do not provide scholars with the structured menus of research options needed for overview perspectives of the book literature on their topics. Searching by keywords is not the same as searching by conceptual categories. Keyword searching does not map the taxonomies that alert researchers to unanticipated aspects of their subjects. It fails to retrieve literature that uses keywords other than those specified by the researcher, he says, missing not only synonyms and variant phrases but also relevant works in foreign languages. Cataloging and classification do provide the recognition mechanisms that scholarship requires for systematic literature retrieval in book collections. OCLC ABSTRACTS - August 29, 2005 (Vol. 8, Issue 35) http://www.guild2910.org/searching.htm
Posted by P. Kaufman at August 30, 2005 7:23 AM
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