Overview of content related to 'search technology'

Book Review: Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff hopes he'll not forget this marvellous book, even when the author seems to suggest it might be better if he did!

In the past the storage and recall of information (the act of remembering) was limited. If people wanted to keep a record, it had to be written down (at great expense in the days before printing) or they had to rely on (notoriously error-prone) human memory. As time moved on, more and more could be recorded, but recall in the analogue world remained difficult - the raison d'être of information science. However, with the proliferation of digital recording and the advent of cheap and vast storage, the balance has shifted. In a world deluged with data - including our personal collections of digital photos, email inboxes and the like - it has become easier to record everything than attempt any kind of manual pruning - deleting bad photographs, irrelevant emails, etc. At the same time recall methods have advanced, so that I can (should I want) look up an email I sent more than five years ago or see what a colleague blogged last year.

This shift from people forgetting to machines remembering is the central theme of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete, published by Princeton University Press. And a fascinating, frightening, well-argued and accessible read it is!

The work opens with the now familiar horror stories of digital remembering - a newly qualified teacher failing to get a job on account of the picture of her on a social networking site, the psychotherapist refused entry to the USA because of a (presumably open access) journal article, published several years before, in which he mentions having taken LSD in the 1960s. Examples of how society is now able to discover (to remember) facts about your life that you have forgotten yourself. This opening chapter neatly sets the scene and highlights just how much Mayer-Schönberger has read around the problem of 'perfect memory'.

In the next two chapters, the reader is taken on a ride through the psychology, sociology and history of forgetting and humankind's battle against it. They culminate in the rise of the technologies that now leave us with a society capable of seemingly perfect memory (though not everything is remembered digitally and we'd do well to remember that!) while individuals are now capable of looking up their past in ways hitherto unimagined. Though the author's arguments are compelling, they are on occasion overstated or based on false premise - is it really all that easy to mine the vast data resources we have at our command yet? However, the book does get the reader thinking and the author himself states that part of his reason for writing it was to stimulate debate.

Chapter IV, Of Power and Time - Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting, is probably my favourite - perhaps because I love a good tale of doom! It examines the consequences of total recall and boils the issue down to two fundamentals. Firstly there is the loss of power, as information about us is duplicated and reused (often out of context) with or without our permission; and secondly the negation of time. Among the issues are two terrifying possibilities: that perfect memory threatens reason, abstract thought and the ability to make decisions in the present, and; that the reasons for retaining data now may seem sensible, but what if (as with the chilling example given) it should fall into the wrong hands in the future?

Having clearly and concisely built a picture of the problem, from the early days of human history to the present, Mayer-Schönberger then turns to some potential solutions. Chapter V outlines six potential responses, drawing on information privacy issues as well as other areas. Curious here is the way he suggests one response would be for information sources (us) to use digital rights management techniques to ensure our data are safe, effectively turning the tables on the music industry or search engines. It is an interesting idea, though one the author later dismisses.

Book Review: Website Optimization

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff used to think 'Website Optimisation' simply meant compressing images and avoiding nested tables, but in this he book finds out how much more there is to it, even in the Age of Broadband.

Serendipity can be a wonderful thing. It was a Tuesday, over coffee, that the esteemed editor of this publication presented me with a copy of Website Optimization and asked if I would be interested in reviewing it. Two days later, at a regular team meeting for the Repositories Support Project [1] (RSP), we discussed (rather generally) how we might boost the search ranking and usage of the RSP Web site.

Digital Repositories: Dealing With the Digital Deluge

editor — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff gives an overall view of the multi-stranded JISC conference held in Manchester over 5-6 June 2007.

Building ResourceFinder

editor — Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff looks at how the RDN has utilised the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol.

Distributed Computing: The Seti@home Project

editor — Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Eddie Young and Pete Cliff look at a particularly successful example of a distributed solution to a very large number crunching problem.

Review: The Oxford English Dictionary Online

editor — Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff previewed the electronic version of this standard reference, and gives a user's verdict.

Cultural history, encyclopaedia, etymological record of the English language, spelling aid...

The Oxford English Dictionary is a number of things, and now it is a web site. What was once evocative of dusty tomes, thumbed by wizened professors of English in the recesses of University libraries is embracing the information age and going online.

Review: Online Searching (Library Association)

editor — Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff reviews the Library Association's guide: Online Searching.

To match the growing trend towards electronic resources and rapid resource discovery, librarians, perhaps the most traditional of resource discovery methods, need to embrace the world of online searching. A correctly executed search or series of searches can yield a number of useful results. But what is the correct way to perform an online search? It is this question that Forrester and Rowlands hope to answer in The Online Searcher's Companion.