Libraries and Academia
The Internet is too primitive to take the leap to supporting the sophisticated indexing, search-and-retrieval services that libraries use.
The Internet is too primitive to take the leap to supporting the sophisticated indexing, search-and-retrieval services that libraries use.
Today, the volume of information being generated on the Internet seems to greatly exceed the ability of any one organization that attempts to categorize all Web pages and other resources. Although there will surely continue to be broad categorizations of Internet resources, a large number of narrower indexes, sometimes called “virtual libraries,” is likely to emerge.
There are and will be problems with digital publishing on the Internet, problems that will call for fresh new goods and services. Or, in business terms, there are market segments emerging and fortunes to be made.
Once its official reports are online, a state government may decide to save money by canceling the paper versions. And every dollar a school spends on computer technology is a dollar that won’t be spent on books.
I can still read the books I bought in the 1970s, but my Hewlett Packard 9830 files might as well be in Sanskrit. In the same way, Stoll cautions, reference works published on CD-ROM may be unreadable in a generation or two. Librarians, beware.
A collaborative filtering system would allow software agents to take into account the opinions of large numbers of people – friends, co-workers, professional opinion leaders and members of other communities – to determine the relevancy of new documents to the agents’ owners. By observing correlations among peoples’ opinions, such agents are expected to offer predictive data without having to solve the much more difficult problems associated with understanding causality or why a particular new document, such as a news report, might be interesting to the agent’s owner.
Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie.
By recognizing the growth of CMC technologies and integrating them into technical communication education, the technical communication instructor can give students competency in a media increasing applications, scope, and importance.
Formats for citations of electronic resources must become standardized, so scholars can accumulate a record of their participation … The goal should be to eliminate self-consciousness in using the medium – ideally, the medium of computer-mediated communication should be transparent, freeing scholars to create ideas.
Scholars who do not address CMC media will be left out of a growing world of information interchange.