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Date:         Fri, 18 Dec 1992 08:27:03 CDT
From:         Alan Emtage <bajan@bunyip.com>
Subject:      RE:Musings on the Infostructure

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Hello,
        A number of people have written in response to my posting about
some of the problems we face in the new world of the Internet and I
welcome the dialog since I too find myself at the start of a long, steep
and (I hope) very interesting learning curve. I apologise for the
verbosity of the response, but it is a subject that I find fascinating
and judging from the mail I've been getting, other people do as well...

I was very interested in seeing the response from Katy Silberger and I
would like to respond to a few points here, and ask a few questions....

[Katy Silberger writes:]
>      As my words will reveal, I am a professional librarian
> and I truely believe in BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL. Alan questions
> the need and wisdom of trying to control something so complex.
> I believe that it is fundamental to the process of scientific
> (in the old Latin sense) communication.  Scholars in any corner
> of the world and at any point in time must be able to follow the
> bibliographic trail mapped out in a document's bibliography.

I certainly don't mean to imply for a moment that bibliographic control
is any less important than it is today. Quite the contrary, I believe
that in such a fluid and flexible environment as computer networks such
control and tracking is even more necessary. My thought however is that
the "objects" to which this control is applied need to be very carefully
chosen. We have neither the resources nor the need to apply such control
to for example, many of the USENET newsgroups. While there are valuable
pieces of information to be found on such things as "alt.flame", I would
suggest that the resources involved in tracking such a volatile animal
would not be justified from the benefits that would result. With limited
resources, let us choose those things which would maximize the amount of
valuable information and let the rest fall where it may.

On a tangentially related point: one of the "mind ruts" that I have had
to try and pull my thoughts out of is thinking of all the information on
the network as "files" or "documents". In this new and scary world of the
Internet, information takes on many guises. While much of the data
currently available still sits on disks on a computer somewhere, we have
to start thinking in terms of "objects" (for lack of a better word). How
do we go about cataloging the new virtual realities that some of our
Comp. Sci. and artistic collegues are creating? These will be very
valuable sources of information and yet we don't have much experience in
cataloging "worlds". The same can be said for multi-media
presentation.... what happens when "smell-o-rama" comes to the Internet
:-) (I know they are classification schemes for scents, but personally,
my mind boggles... :-) This is another area in which we techies need to
draw on the experience of the library community to provide the
infostructure that our nieces and nephews can use.

> I think that the problem with the corner store analogy
> is that we are looking at one month's production of a minute
> fraction of the all the serials published.  Furthermore, the
> corner store has a much more limited clientele that all but
> the smallest special library, and therefore can arrange things
> according to a very personalized scheme.

...and that is exactly my point. We will have the "corner store" and the
"library" co-existing in the same infostructure and that is to be
encouraged. Some of us will be happy to go to the corner store for the
"quick and dirty" information. If we are not satisfied with the service
we will either give up or find somewhere else which provides what we are
looking for.

Thought of in terms of real money, I can envision a situation where I've
heard of an article in a recent edition of _Time Magazine_ which I might
be interested in. I go to the corner store and see if they have it by
browsing through the editions they have on their racks. Since they are a
kind of "mom and pop" operation, chances are they only have this and
maybe last week's issue. However the search is cheap since the services
provided is minimal. If I don't find what I am looking for I have the
choice of going to the publisher directly (they too will be on the Net)
or locating the nearest library specializing in weekly news magazines.
They provide full-text indexing, abstracts, high-resolution, full color
versions of every article published by _Time_ since Adam was a child. I
_know_ that if it is in there, then they will have it... but at a higher
price... all that wizbang costs money and I'll have to decide if it is
worth my while to pay for it.

Somewhere, someone decided that it was worth the valuable resources of
librarians to track weekly news magazines and it provides a needed
service.... we can't afford to throw such talents at anything that is
informationally "warm".

I'm not trying to start the "commercial Internet" debates here.... all of
this is to say that our scarce resouces need to be very carefully managed.

>       The gist of the comments concerning classification schemes
> escaped me, but I had quite a reaction to the assertion that
> it should be possible to achieve one-to-one mapping between
> any two classification schemes.  I STRONGLY DISAGREE.
[...]

I'm not sure I understand what is meant here by "synthetic" not coming
out of the cataloging field and I would be interested in finding out.
However, I would assume that any non-numbered system would necessarily
have very strong rules for determining what the various components of the
"classification string" were (otherwise a large percentage of the objects
being cataloged would be lost if another individual could not replicate
the steps necessary to generate this string). I am suggesting (and am
more than willing to be corrected on this), that such rules could be
"taught" to the computer as well. I don't mean to say that the computer
would try to do the cataloging, but rather when presented with such a
string, it could decompose it and with reference to other databases
(translation tables and the like), perform the mapping between different
schemes.

>       Certainly user communities are one good forum of organization
> but may have cultural limitations and certainly will have
> limits over time.  I see these user communities as  being a more
> open and expansive form of the "informal college".  They are very
> useful for the present.  They are very personalized, but they
> can only accomodate communication among the currently living.

I see the infostructure created by a community (and there can be a
"community of one") as being an evolving, living organism. If I were able
to organize the information that I knew about into a useful view, this
might be adopted by others with similar interests. However, if I then
turned my mind to another topic, I could expect that view to be adopted
and continue with its existence separately from myself.

Many of my ideas on this have come out of reading the work of, and talking
to, Clifford Neuman (bcn@isi.edu) of the Infomation Sciences Institute
(ISI) of USC who has created the Prospero system (based on the Virtual
System Model). Prospero allows anyone to create their own individualized
view of a "file system". This means that you can take the existing file
structure and rearrange it (put files in different directories etc) to
suit your own needs. None of these files need exist on your or even any
one computer... you can take a directory from a machine in Korea and mix
it up with files from one in Estonia if you wish. Additionally one can
apply individual "filters" to the view to make arbitrary data
transformations. [Those of you interested in this should send mail to
info-prospero@isi.edu for more information].

I personally believe that this is a very powerful mechanism since the
view that you create can be "exported" to the world allowing other users
to see and possibly modify that view. They can also "import" that view
and modify it for their own individual needs. One I think can see where
this idea, when expanded to include more things than files, could go.

As always, discussion on the ideas expressed here is welcomed.


--
-Alan

+1 (514) 398-8117
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