by Phil Ciciora, University of Illinois News Bureau
The perception that plugging a few keywords into Google will yield a universe of relevant information is somewhat mistaken, say Kathryn LaBarre and Carol L. Tilley, professors of library and information science at Illinois.
[Our emphasis] “There’s a lot of excitement about the availability of full text,” LaBarre said. “But the perception often is, ‘If you have full text, why do you need to do anything else other than providing good search capabilities?’ Well, it turns out that full-text search isn’t always king, especially for something iterative like folklore literature.”]
Ed. Note: Well said Professor LaBarre and thanks for saying it.
According to the scholars, the result is that too often the value of providing systematic, reliable and meaningful access to the contents of the texts is negated. Libraries and archives themselves play a role in this negation when, in an effort to save time and money, they are forced to rely on “good enough” records to provide access to the resources in their collections.
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