MIT 144F: Week7
Key Concepts from the Lynch (1997) Article

• The Internet is NOT a digital library:
  1. lack of human intervention
  2. no collection/selection criteria
  3. lack of subject organization (classification systems)
  4. reliance on automatic search/classification/description mechanisms

• Advantages of NOT being a digital library
  1. lack of human intervention makes the Internet more "democratic"
  2. information is more dynamic
  3. information is more diverse
  4. information can be more current
  5. search engines can handled very large amounts of data inexpensively
  6. search engines can pinpoint the needed information within a document collection

• Disadvantages of NOT being digital library
  1. humans better at giving "overviews" of information
  2. humans best for recommending "best" sources
  3. lack of formal archival functions (pages "disappear")

• Conclusions:
  1. Those wanting the "digital library" approach will probably have to subscribe to special services to pay for the cost of human intervention.
  2. Low-cost/no-cost , advertiser-supported, search services will rely on automated indexing (i.e. webcrawlers and spiders).
  3. Final thought: it will be "social and economic issues, rather than technological ones, [that] will exert the greatest influence in shaping the future of information retrieval on the Internet (Lynch 1997)."