Since the early days of search, categorization of data on the web has been done primarily by marketers. The obvious problem is that marketers don’t know how to (or don’t want to) properly categorize anything, so documents are constantly mislabeled. Imagine a bookstore where all the jackets were switched around. Now imagine that there are one billion books with incorrect labels. It’s chaos. And nobody is there to tell us how to look beneath the jacket to find the content we want and need.
In the future, that ought to be the job of the librarian. The obvious problem with that is that most librarians are stuck in libraries, pushing books around. The major search engines haven’t created enough appropriate demand to get them away from their desks and involved in organizing the index.
Seth Godin nailed it in his post: The future of the library
We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.
I agree completely. I see the role of the librarian as an internet guide, instructing us how to find information online quickly and efficiently. On the search index and content creation side, the librarian is an invaluable asset in creating meaningful information architectures.
But we’re not there, so we have to teach ourselves how to root for information truffles deep underneath the dirt of the search indexes. As the index grows and the layers become more complex, information will be harder to find – so those who can do it quickly are going to have a clear advantage over everyone else.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 17, 2011 at 5:27 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged librarians, trackback tuesday. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.