Interoperability Is a Lie
Posted On Sep 5 2007Since I’ve said it a few times, I thought I would get it down in print before it got taken out of context or worse. “Interoperability is the biggest lie in automation today.” The word is thrown around as easily and meaninglessly as “friend.” Interoperable is, at best, an adjective for standards-based systems, and at worst, a hack to cover up the fact that different systems are not at all meant to speak to one another. The former case is so rare as to make it the exception; the latter case is perpetual job security for systems people. interoperability Function: …
ICE is Nice
Posted On Aug 29 2007I am willing to admit that I remain skeptical about the “one big pile” approach to next generation catalogs that is sweeping the library automation world. While I don’t agree that advanced relevance ranking techniques are ineffective on bibliographic records (go look, there is no literature that I can find on this topic…there’s tons on full-text, but nothing on surrogate record relevance), I wonder what happens when the catalog becomes more than it used to be. If a relevance algorithm is based on whether or not a library holds a title, what happens when an article is thrown in the …