I was relaxing by taking a moment to be indignant over Verisign's disgusting move, and saw this article on The Register: Google - the only archive we'll ever need?
Someone thought Google could be considered an archive (for longer than a month or so)? Someone thought Google safeguarded privacy (in a broad society wide sense)? Ouch.
Two comments seem relevant to the RedLightGreen enterprise, however:
"The implications of Google have real implications for mass social procedure, on how we enquire," said Byfield. "It's so much bigger than terrifying - it's Interesting." and "I'm a librarian, and I like Google," said Steve Cisler from the floor. "But I appreciate the point being made that there are different information domains. There is a whole lot of information that's not on the Internet and may possibly be offline."
...may possibly be offline and residing in those book thingies in a library somewhere. Hopefully, RedLightGreen will begin to be a bridge between that changed way of inquiring and those "possibly offline" resources.
Merrilee Proffit gave her presentation today to the RLG staff. I'm not sure how i feel about how positively folks responded. They seem to think this engine, which will only be promoted at the pilot institutions, will be swooped on and used by the whole country by October. This, after months of struggling with how to reach students at the pilot institutions, seems just surreal. Do students really want to find *books*? (We think students just want to find journal articles.)
...back to work
Posted by judielaine at September 17, 2003 03:43 PM | TrackBackJudith,
I've been following your blog for a while now -- and look forward to the launch of http://redlightgreen.com/ (I wrote about RedLightGreen on my blog: http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee/2003/05/05#a787 and saw that you had seen it at some point.)
Good luck and best wishes!
-Raymond
Posted by: Raymond Yee at September 18, 2003 11:33 PM