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From: eachus@largo.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: building an interstate (data) highway with no roadmaps
In-Reply-To: worley@compass.com's message of 18 Jun 91 13:49:57 GMT
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	<WORLEY.91Jun18094957@sn1987a.compass.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 16:47:09


     I was at a Hypertext meeting a year or so ago, and after
listening to all the talks, I commented to a friend: "You know, we had
librarians for thousands of years before the invention of movable type
made them necessary.  In Hypertext, everyone is trying to do it the
other way round."

     What I see on the net makes the Hypertext people sound like
forward thinkers.  The net is even more chaotic than the (often
static) environments that have been used in Hypertext prototypes.  In
the Hypertext arena the problem is that they are developing the tools
without considering how the necessary databases will be created.  On
the net, we have much more data than anyone can comprehend, but no
support for even developing the tools.

     What the world and the net need is a new type of organization
which is a software library.  Given funding, such an institution could
provide disk space (cheap), net access (not so cheap, but arguably
billable to actual users, software developers to provide the necessary
tools (no big deal), and actual software LIBRARIANS to develop a
cataloging system and actually organize all this stuff.  That will be
by far the bigest expense.  There is as yet no Dewey Decimal system
for software, but we desparately need it.

     Incidently, all the fancy software in the world with multiple
keys, multiple views, etc. won't address that need.  What make the
Dewey system (or Library of Congress) useful is that once I have it in
my head, I know where books on say Cryptography are to be found, and I
can find related books that I didn't know about.  A keyword probe will
miss closely related--but different--subjects.
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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