Dec. 4: Notess, Ru and Horowitz

The last blog of the semester is upon us. I can hardly believe it's over, it went by so quickly. This week's articles were about L2, or Library 2.0, and the "invisible web," the behind-the-scenes, non-indexed (and, therefore, unsearchable) web. Greg Notess discusses in his article, "The Terrible Twos: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and More," the ambiguous and sometimes controversial concepts of 2.0 applications and their implications for the library of the future. The terms are ambiguous because there is still debate as to what, exactly, they mean. They're controversial because sometimes people don't particularly like the terms and argue that the definitions are too broad. Notess cautions, however, that before we completely dismiss Library 2.0, we should "visit some of the example sites, experiment with their capabilities, and imagine the possibilities for products and processes" (42). Some of the L2 concepts he discusses, such as instant messaging, RSS, wikis, social networking, and blogs, can already be seen to be effective tools in place in many libraries. As the Internet grows to be a more interactive tool, Library 2.0 will be, in my opinion, more and more appropriate and important in the future.

Yangbo Ru and Ellis Horowitz's article, "Indexing the invisible web: A survey," discusses the two sides of the web; the visible, searchable side that we see every day by entering terms into a search engine, and the hidden side, or the invisible web. The invisible web "refers to the vast collection of information that is accessible via the worldwide web, but is not indexed by conventional search engines" (249). This can include databases, audio and video clips, and intentionally excluded pages, such as pornography. Some search engines have applications in place that automatically index the invisible side of web sites. Some others are indexed by human beings, which, of course, means that the indexing is limited to the preference and experience of the indexer. Another factor of indexing web content is that there are many different interfaces, thus making it difficult to design a one-size-fits-all solution to accomodate all of the invisible content out there. The authors suggest "a technique that can more comprehensively index the data in an invisible web site...that will not get swamped by the size of the data" (262).

I guess I had never given much thought to the "invisible web" before. It seems like there is so much content out there already and, as Ru and Horowitz note, the hidden, unsearchable side of the web contains much more information than the Publicly Indexable Web (249). It seems like a monumental task but, as time goes on and the web evolves and gets even larger, such a task will mean more opportunity for information professionals. As I come to my last semester in graduate school, my thoughts turn to jobs, interviews, and resumes - scary stuff... Library 2.0 and the invisible web, though, respectively, controversial and unfathomable in terms of magnitude, give me hope for the future of librarianship and my role as an information professional.

Happy Holidays everyone! Here's a recipe
I'm going to try this Xmas. It's from our friends at Forward Foods and it looks delicious. Actually, I picked up some of the Smokey Blue cheese today and, well, just trust me - try it.