Wed 30 Jul 2008
The Internet Search Environment Number (ISEN) is a fantastic idea. On-line databases would be assigned their own, unique number, similar to an ISBN or ISSN, which would identify them as a resource. This would aid tremendously in organizing and ultimately accessing these troves of information that, for the most part, belong to the deep web.
found via Catalogablog
July 30th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Thansk for the nod of support.
You in particular are my core constituancy, that is an acquisitions librarian.
For each search environment that registers an ISEN, the librarian in charge of vetting the metadata would be paid a percentage of the annual fee. We don’t quite know the price point yet. But the math is how do you get 10K librarians to catalog 10M databases in 1yr. We will get the cataloging module down to a decent amount to ease of use and short period of time this should mean 3 or 4 a day per librarian. Doable. Crowdsourcing is nothing new to catalogers. Nor is CIP to publishers.
The push back from librarians to ISEN may be though the ISEN is a for profit organization. We need to be not only sustainable, but show that librarianship adds real value even profitable value. Until then libsci won’t get the dollars it needs to be a recognized player in the Internet or Search worlds. What we are suggesting is that librarians get compensated and set the market value higher than is currently recognized. Librarians will receive residual income for each search environment that continues their annual fee.
So in a sense, librarians are quality assurance agents in the ISEN model. I don’t think many in the search industry are even thinking about human judgment as a hybrid to algorithmic.
I hope that enough librarians will be warm to a for profit model. (BTW ISBN is privately run, ISSN is LOC.
ISEN is in near full transparancy mode now.
Feel free to fire away with questions or concerns.
Kind Regards,
-Matt
July 30th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I was expecting a spell check on your blog.
Sorry about the spelling and such.
August 5th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Just found this - a remarkable idea. Hope it takes off. There is so much valuable verified information held in databases which are overlooked by the majority of net surfers.