Concept 32
A library is, fundamentally, a system organised according to shared, accepted sets of classifications and organisations, and on the basis that it is impossible to access the information except through categories (either in a catalogue or by browsing collocated books on a shelf). The World Wide Web has no such shared system, and is technologically capable of a large degree of searching for information directly – ‘full text searching’. What advanced users seek to do is to exploit the advantages of the idea of a library in a way that suits their personal needs, effectively creating personal virtual libraries.
The web is a complex structure, made from thousands of computers linked together with millions of packets of information buzzing all around, on demand, all the time. It is a brilliant source of information to those of us on the planet lucky enough to have access. The vast amount of information, ideas and opinions can lead to hours of browsing and entertainment – and sometimes also to addiction! However the common metaphor of the internet as a virtual library does not really reflect its true structure and behaviour.
The library, familiar to us all is an area filled with books filled with thousands of strategically placed words, that remain static, and are easy to catalogue as once they are placed in a position, they are not moved. If a book is taken, the code on the spine will clearly indicate the location that it should be returned to. The process of publishing a book will involves the processes of proof reading and quality checking. You can assume that a book has been thought suitable for the general public if it is resident on a library shelf.
The internet, however, is vastly different to this. The information placed there is unverified. In the case of a large company you could assume to believe the information, as it would have been through the rigor of quality checking as within a library, but there is a lot of other information on the net that is largely opinion and potentially unreliable.
The speed of change on the internet also means there is no permanency in the information provided. All active websites undergo continuous change, expansion and contraction, as the information the developer feels is relevant to the online community changes. A book clearly states the date it was published, internet users can not always be sure when a web page was created.
Social bookmarking sites give user the ability to catalogue their favourite web pages, and also enables others to see their most favoured and trusted pages. Delicious.com is one of the bookmarking websites that can be used to mark commonly used pages. I’ve just opened the site and 262 new bookmarks were saved in the last minute!
The advantage of bookmarking pages is that you can easily return to them. When searching just through a search engine, results can change from day to day and by using different kinds of search engines, so you can’t always rely on getting the same results.
Most webpages are found by machines called web crawlers, which records small amounts of data on the pages to be references in searches. Unfortunately only a small amount of the information on the web is covered by web crawlers, and there is not the element of human decision to decide on the accuracy and trustworthiness of the site. This can render search engine results as often less than reliable.
As time goes on better keywords, tags and referencing will be built into websites, and search engines will become smarter to search more broadly for concepts rather than just single key words, to provide much more relevant and useful results.
Supporting Site 1:
http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/05/10/8-tips-for-better-delicious-bookmarking/
This site gives some ideas for how to extend the use of the delicious bookmarking features to enable easier location of websites you may have saved. Given the responses at the end of the article, it would seem that there are a lot of web developers who use the bookmarking function as a regular part of their day.
I’ve learnt that an additional advantage of using a social bookmarking site such as this is that the details are all backed up on the bookmarking server, so if your computer crashes or you are using an alternative computer, you can still access all your favoured sites just as easily.
Supporting Site 2:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/23/john.bartelle/index.html
This is an interview with John Batelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, who has been close to the heart of internet searching for many years. He discusses some of the features of current searching, legal issues, and the future of search. He quotes Microsoft as having done some research and finding that around 50% of searches ever locate the information that is being sought.
He also discussed the interesting issue of privacy – where search engines would like to follow your movements around the web to tailor make better search results for you, but this is in contravention to privacy laws.
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