Re: [xanadu] flecks ?????

[Stuart A Yeates <say1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff Rush <jrush@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Stuart A Yeates wrote:
> > 
> > > One area I've wrestled with is the Xanadu idea of royalties.  
> > > A central billing system is a threat to privacy.
> > What's wrong with the current system of libraries ?
> > 
> > I'm a member of 3 different traditional libraries (a university 
> > library and two municipal libraries).
> 
> I'm unclear on your suggestion.  Are you saying that traditional
> libraries are intrinsically more trustworthy than a vendor and that
> we should share our reading interests with them and hope they do
> not share them?

Yes. In theory, at least, libraries and librarians are agents for library 
users rather than agents for publishers.

> While I believe many librarians work hard to protect the privacy of
> readers, I'm not sure that is universally true, especially in all
> countries.

Professional librarians in the western tradition have explicit codes of ethics 
(i.e. the ALA---American Library Association's code) which emphasize their 
role as agents for library users (although they don't use the word agent 
usually). Privacy is a BIG issue for librarians.

> Perhaps it's taking place in certain journals or at specific 
> conferences.  I'd love to fine current discussion of the fine 
> points of the Xanadu technology along with many other arch-
> independent algorithms of which you speak. 

Well the stuff I'm working on is automated computer recognition and and 
understanding of bibliometric data. Bibliometery is a field of Library and 
Information Science and Bibliometery data is the core document metadata 
(author, title, date of publication---all the stuff from the title page) and 
the references in the bibliography.

Broadly speaking the aim is to answer problems such as ``what documents 
reference document X'' (traditionally done selectively using a citation 
index), ``what are the founding documents of field Y?'' ``who are the most 
respected (cited) researchers in field Z?'' ``have any articles by researcher 
A ever been cited in a first teer journal?'' ...

Currently these are done in a very crude way by engines such as 
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs and 
http://www.cora.justresearch.com/
 
This is generalized digital library research, but stuff that Xanadu will need.

stuart


--    stuart yeates <s.yeates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> aka `loam'
"Oh, havoc," cried Pooh, as he let slip the heffalumps of war.
X-no-archive:yes