ANDREW%BROWNVM@BUACCA.BU.EDU (Andrew Gilmartin) (03/21/89)
Hypertext provides a directed approach to information access but who is going to provide the directed links? A hypertext is not an end in itself but is a system for expressing implicit and explicit relations, and for handling version and presentation control. Hypertext is the desirable frontend to something much more powerful. What we need are filtering schemes for information. The encumbrance of print material has forced us to develop codification and condensation schemes that hide this overwhelming weight of information. Unfortunately, there is no such encumbrance to assessing online information and it is this coupled with the one dimensional representation of online texts that makes the whole online experience overwhelming. Indices, tables of contents, concordances, etc, are all forms of filtering. These can and have been adapted for online use. But these schemes were originally developed for very small texts--a book, a series of essays, an encyclopedia. They wont work to manage the mass of information rapidly collecting in the world's archives (which range from the Oxford Text Archive copy of Cicero to your credit line at TRW.) There are a number of newer filters available today. The two that seem to have the most promise are searches based on criteria of terms organized hierarchically into "topics" and retrieval based on relevance ordering. Has anyone on the list used these types of filters (available in Personal Librarian, Topic, Sires)? -- Andrew Gilmartin Computing & Information Services Brown University andrew@brownvm.brown.edu