The index  

Caleb McDaniel (via Paul Musgrave) has an eye-opening post on Google Print and what it means for scholarship. I hadn't given it a serious look until now, but the quantity of information available on some of the more obscure searches I could conjure was impressive. My one question about it is organization -- Caleb emphasizes the skill needed to devise an intelligent search, but the presentation of results is a far less subtle point that could dramatically improve we read and interpret all this information. Right now it seems to operate with on old-style keyword relevance, rather than any kind of imputed authority (a la PageRank). This arrangement might work for scholars, but the information hardly seems accessible if it come in a disorganized avalanche.

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday about Wikipedia. He has some reservations about it because of the way it relies on the passion of those who write the entries; this is a problem for him first of all because some topics (those with no enthuisiasts) are left out while others are emphasized, but also because passion poisons objectivity. What's interesting about this though is that it works -- passion turns out to be a successful organizing principle, because it's a good surrogate for authority. It's not perfect, obviously, but the information certainly isn't random -- rather it's carefully structured, at least as much so as in Encyclopaedia Britannica, even if the guiding principles are different.

I'm not suggesting that this particular scheme be adopted for Google Print; but keyword relevance is antiquated, and there might be more opportunity for innovation here than just on the dimensions of library size and access speed. Does this mean I'm unsatisfied with the way information is presented in libraries now? Absolutely -- call it laziness on my part, but in every sense besides the actual access to print-published content, the searchable internet is organizationally superior to any library. Now that we're putting these print publications on line, why can't we adapt our organizational advances to the new (!) resource?