…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing
…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles
– James A. Evans, Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.
Posted on 
July 19th, 2008 by 
Simon Greenhill
2 Responses to “…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
July 29th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
One of my favorite things to do when I am starting research on a topic is to stack surf for interesting and somewhat related books that the computer database missed. I would love to find a way to create a computer database which would specifically do “loose” searches for articles/books that are only tangentially related (maybe topic-unrelated articles by the same authors, stuff published in the same issue of the journal, etc.)
July 29th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Hi Frank, and thanks for the comment.
I have to admit that I often avoid going to the library to get things precisely because I know that I’ll end up browsing and come back with 10 times as many books as I went for (that I’ll never have time to read)!
I know that the “loose” searching/recommendation area is one that’s undergoing a lot of research. Amazon.com for example recommends products similar to the one you’re looking at. Companies like Amazon are looking into these because of the marketing potential.
Some of the social bookmarking sites like reddit do something similar - they recommend links to you based on your history. As I understand it, they track that you like articles x and y. Now, if other users who liked x and y, also like z, then you probably would like z too.
So - lots of potential, and I really think we’ll see some exciting applications soon. I’m looking forward to it.
–Simon