There is a growing mountain of research...The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less remember. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same that was used in the days of the square rigged ships (section 1).And this passage from Swanson rings as true today as it did in 1960:
A scientist who nowadays imagines either that he is keeping up with his field or that he can later find in the library whatever may have escaped his notice when it was first written is a victim of what might be called the 'fallacy of abundance'. The fact that so much can be found on any subject creates an illusion that little remains hidden. Although library searches probably seem more often than not to be successful simply because a relatively satisfying amount of material is exhumed, such success may be illusory, since the requester cannot assess the quantity and value of the relevant information which he fails to discover (page 1099).With the development of online databases, OPACs, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, it is obvious that we need efficient and effective methods to locate and retrieve relevant information. Information retrieval is no longer an issue for scholars and scientific professionals only; it has become everyone’s challenge.
References
Bush, V. (1945, July). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 101-108. Retrieved 24 February, 2008, from http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml
Swanson, D.R. (1960). Searching natural language text by computer. Science, 132(21), 960-1104.
2 comments:
excellent points here. Is technology really an advantage if things are just as "hidden". And you have the added disadvantage of patrons that are unwilling to use it or unsure of their results on it. I did some reading last semester on those bad searches and it was really interesting, they studied how many were adequate and then tried to look at the comparison between how much information was available but not recovered. Interesting.
It is an interesting point made by V. Bush about the explosion of knowledge. Yet, the amount of available knowledge, information, and published data has grown exponentially in the past half a century (since Bush wrote about this). There are periods in history when there were leaps in knowledge like when the printing industry and technology advanced so that information could be more widespread.
But currently it is becoming overwhelming. Retrieval needs the assistance of experienced individuals -- such as librarians.
Librarians will have to instruct on searching skills; search engines have to develop easily facilitated searches; schools have to teach how to search & analyze data; critical thinking skills have to be honed -- if individuals are to retrieve needed information.
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