The ISKO event at UCL on Thursday was fascinating. It was a real treat to hear the eminent Brian Vickery summarise the last 75 years of information retrieval developments, setting out the key questions to be answered and the challenges still to be overcome. At 90 years old he has a unique overview, having been a key member of the Classification Research Group and director of SLAIS. He pointed out that most retrieval systems have a particular user community in mind and that this affects the choice of information collected as well as the way the collection is structured. He also argued that being accepted as part of a specialist community involves use of the specialist terminology. I am very interested in the reverse of this – that lack of access to the “rght” terminology is exclusionary. It’s all about shibboleths! He said that key questions at the moment include – whether the costs and effort of building expensive retrieval systems like taxonomies are justified, whether the need for harmonisation is increasing, what is the future for general ontologies, and what needs to be done to improve statistical retrieval systems.
Stephen Robertson from Microsoft Research, who developed search algorithms that still power most of the big search engines today, talked about the TREC competition, which has almost always been won by statistically based searches. He drew a distinction between general purpose search and specialised search for highly specific contexts – such as individual organisations – adding that in general specialist search is lagging behind. He also said that we need to find ways of feeding other sources of knowledge – such as taxonomies – into statistical searching because only by yoking the power of both will we get marked improvements.
Ian Rowlands then talked about the much publicised JISC survey on the “Google generation” concluding that they are much the same as other generations. In all age groups about 20% are expert users of technology and 20% technophobes, with everyone else muddling along in the middle. The JISC project team observed that some people spend a long time looking at online navigation systems, sometimes without accessing any articles at all. It is hard to know whether this counts as success or failure. I can think of scenarios either way – often I just want to know what’s there and will return later, sometimes it means I can rule out a source as useless (which might be a good thing if it has saved me the time of reading through irrelevant articles or might be a bad thing if it means I can’t find what I need).
There was then a very interesting discussion in which people expressed concerns about information overload and the way that students find it hard to distinguish between authoritative and trivial sources. Ian lamented the fact that online you don’t have the visual clues that you had in physical libraries – big chunky leather bound books have an obvious “weight” and authority. Personally, I wonder how much this has been driven by the desire of publishers and teachers to make educational resources “fun”. If all your text books look like adverts and all your online learning resources look like pop videos, how are you going to learn which is which? It is perfectly possible to have an authoritative online style and publishers will produce it if that is what sells best. Throughout my career I have urged “authoritativeness” in design and been told by marketing departments that it isn’t what parents, teachers and kids want – they’ll only buy it if it looks flashy and fluffy! Another issue is the lack of a canon in a post-modern world – but that’s another story!
Here’s a post on the event on Madi Solomon’s Taxonomy Society blog.
I’ve been mulling over the problem of distinguishing serious from trivial resources (or simply determining the quality of the information which you are digesting). This can be especially true in niche areas, or areas in which there are no ‘right or wrong’ answers.
I keep coming back to the conclusion that simple personal recommendations are rated far higher by users of information than almost any other source, and can often save hours of fruitless time on the Internet. I’ll nearly always phone my mum for a recipe or gardening tip, for example, then trying to search on-line for same!
I think a lot of people do just want to ask someone they trust. I was chatting to someone at the ISKO event who pointed out that before the Internet came along it was completely acceptable to ask an “expert”, rather than doing your own research. That expert might be the local librarian, but asking someone you trusted – teacher, librarian, knowledgeable friend – was just the obvious starting point for research, and not considered “lazy” or “cheating”. There did seem to be a bit of nostalgia for the book or academic journal as the prime source of information amongst certain academics. I have a hunch that the introverted or pessimistic ones fear the rabble will make a mess of the ivory tower, whereas the extroverted and optimistic ones want to fling open the doors to let in some new faces and new ideas. However, the key question of deciding what is a good and valid source applies in all formats. You have to decide if it makes more sense to ask your mum for a recipe, rather than your mate or the chef at your local gastropub. Ideally, I suppose, you’d ask all three to see if they said the same thing!
I think this is something that trips up a lot of people into taxonomy and that kind of thing:
“Ideally, I suppose, you’d ask all three to see if they said the same thing!”
There’s an assumption that people want ‘perfect’ information, or perfectly qualified information, or a statistically valid sample of information sources… or something (I’m not an expert).
I think what people really want is just a single trusted source — just one person or other source whose opinion or information they are willing to trust almost blindly, even if they know it might not be perfect or even necessarily correct.
Having one easy to use and generally reliable source is great – it’s the principle that
sells encyclopedias and reference books – and what reference publishers are selling is the authority – you can follow this source blindly because we the authors have worked really hard to check the information for you.
I just don’t think it is possible to have a single information source that will be right for everybody all the time. Sometimes you want “general knowledge” and you are happy for it to be “good enough”, sometimes you need something more specialised. I would hope that safety inspectors at nuclear power stations work to higher standards than schoolchildren doing a science project on nuclear power and doctors prescribing drugs want to be sure they use accurate dosages, not just some number that might not necessarily be correct!
Most people may not need much good quality information in their daily lives (although I suspect most people actually need quite a lot), but there will always be people from students to town planners to nuclear physicists who need to make judgements about and get to grips with unfamiliar sources, which is where common systems – such as taxonomies – can help.