20110709-015523.jpgIn his recent talk at the ALA conference last month, Eric Hellman focused on how libraries can best enable discovery, especially as increasing computational power makes it easy for patrons to perform sophisticated searches. He suggests two options:

One alternative is to insist on getting the full text for everything they offer. (Unglued ebooks offer that, that’s what we’re working on at Gluejar.)

The other alternative for libraries is to feed their bibliographic data to search engines so that library users can discover books in libraries. Outside libraries, this process is known as “Search Engine Optimization”. When I said during my talk that this should be the number one purpose of library data looking forward, one tweeter said it was “bumming her out”. If the term “Search Engine Optimization” doesn’t work for you, just think of it as “helping people find things”.

Library produced data is still important, but it’s not essential in the way that it used to be. The most incisive question during my talk pointed out that the sort of cataloging that libraries do is still absolutely essential for things like photographs and other digital archival material. That’s very true, but only because automated analysis of photographs and other materials is computationally hard. In ten years, that might not be true. iPhoto might even be enough.

Read the full article at Go To Hellman.

(Photo: a trying youth)

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