The Economist The human touch
"DESPITE the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to particular questions. For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such “cyborg” companies use computers as levers for the mind, to make the most of precious human expertise."

redux [03.19.01]
Strange Connections Little Blue Folders
"The Web is big. A billion pages big, according to a recent study by Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute. It's the ultimate testing ground for information retrieval technologies."

"If your search engine can automatically bring order to this overwhelming global mess of stuff, just think what it can do for a single web site or intranet. No more agonizing over the design of topical hierarchies. No more worrying about how you'll afford your growing staff of information architects. Just sit back and let the software work its magic.

"Perhaps the biggest problem with these automated approaches to classification is the fact that they're completely content-centric. They focus solely on organizing the stuff inside the folders, ignoring the broader information ecology.

"The key to success in designing information architecture solutions for really large web sites and intranets is to intelligently combine manual AND automated approaches."

redux [06.29.00]
The New York Times The Search Engine as Cyborg
[requires 'free' registration]
"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]
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."