ranganathan’s laws, updated

Posted on by jessamyn

My pal Fred from ibiblio said he met Lennart Björneborn this week. I checked out his site and he’s adapted Ranganathan’s five principles of library science to the web world. Even though they are copyrighted [?], I’ll include them here:

  • Links are for use – the very essence of hypertext
  • Every surfer his or her link – the rich diversity of links across topics and genres
  • Every link its surfer – ditto
  • Save the time of the surfer – visualizing web clusters and small-world shortcuts
  • The Web is a growing organism

google scholar, let the feeding frenzy begin

Posted on by jessamyn

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.

  • Google won’t say what it does and does not consider “scholarly”. My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a “library search” [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
  • no ads on Google Scholar pages
  • Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.

Upshot? Don’t know. As a public librarian, I find less and less reason to dig around in scholarly archives. On the other hand, just as I fear that WorldCat searching will become inaccurately synonymous with “find it at a library” I don’t want to see this filling in for “find it in a research paper” Librarians know the difference, does everyone else?