End of Indexes

I believe in Clay Shirky's "Law" : the social software most likely to succeed has “a brutally simple mental model … that’s shared by all users” [Michael Nielson].

I'm going to suggest that, for the average person, the mental model of the library is "free learning materials that I can use because I belong to a particular place or group".

I'm still working through the ramifications if I'm right about our users' collective mindset. Here's one particular consequence I'm giving serious consideration: libraries shouldn't provide indexes anymore. In libraryland lingo, its fulltext or bust and we let discovery happen at the network level.

Bibliocommons Knowledge

For those of you who are, like myself, following the work of Bibliocommons, I bring to your attention that Knowledge Ontario has recently announced that they will be shortly approaching libraries in Ontario with the opportunity to implement the Bibliocommons interface as part of an early adopters program.

Research is not about finding everything but

“Excuse me, but research isn’t about finding everything. That’s not really how it works at all … this idea of a single search that brings back every relevant item is not like the process of research as it is actually practiced. Research involves finding a few, or even one, good thing, then checking what that one thing references, and checking those sources … then branching out rapidly from there. Literature is not made up of a colection of items connected by having common keywords … a literature is composed of a collection of items connected by common ideas and a community of thinkers who are influenced by each other’s works. It’s about following the network of citations, really.”

Crowd : (nodding)

Me: (now all excited) ”So, what search should do is get your foot in the door, not hand you “everything” … Google works because it gets you some stuff, not everything..."

The above is from a post entitled Search and Research from Doug's Mind. I think his epiphany is worth expanding upon.

What if libraries tried to create a something that brought you some of the best starting points to research?