Wired News Ask a Librarian, Not Jeeves
""The public focus has swiveled to the Internet and away from libraries," said Donna Dinberg of the National Library of Canada. While interest in the library help desk is declining, free commercial Web help services such as Ask Jeeves, Webhelp.com and Yahoo are thriving.

With all these commercial online reference services, will librarians become obsolete? Dinberg wants to shift the info-power back to her domain.

"We know that libraries can provide authoritative information, both online and offline," she said. "And we feel that the only thing stopping us is the fact that patrons aren't coming to the library much anymore."

A new project is attempting to make the library an even more vital research source than ever before. The Library of Congress and its partner libraries are launching a pilot project to bring librarians' expertise to the Internet by forming a global reference desk that is available 24 hours, seven days a week."

The Guardian Unlimited Searching questions
"In five years I hope they will be able to return answers, not just documents. Some companies have tried to do that today but they do not work very well, which is why Google still returns documents. In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge - not just web pages. "

redux [06.29.00]
The New York Times The Search Engine as Cyborg
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"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."

"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.

The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.

To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."

First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."

redux [06.15.00]
The New York Times The Library as the Latest Web Venture
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"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""

""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."

"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.

In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."

Digital LIbrary Magazine Who Is Going to Mine Digital Library Resources? And How?
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."

"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."