Week 11: Digital Library & Web Search

(1) As technology continues to advance, it is becoming more and more prevalent that libraries, educational systems, and scholarly communities move beyond the hardbound books and journals into a more digital front. (2) Institutional repositories would allow researchers to manage and distribute their digital materials created within a specific institution or by its community members. (3) These repositories would help to ensure access to these materials, as well as preservation and organization.  (4) A repository should not be limited to only researching faculty members, but should also include students and the community.  (5) With the masses of information being poured on to the internet through various sources, such as these institutional repositories, the question of how these are indexed comes to the forefront.  (6) Indexing algorithms are used by search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (GYM), to rapidly identify indexing terms in the documents that may contain a particular word or phrase that a searcher is looking for.  (7) I won't even attempt to understand how these algorithms work because I am extremely ignorant when it comes to these things.  But I know that search engines operate on query algorithms which searches online resources for the query key terms. (8) Many search engines have various ways of speeding these query searches along. Some of these include skipping, early termination, document numbers, and caching.  (9) The quality of these results may vary from user to user.  For example, one user may search for Pot Roast looking for the history of pot roasts, but get top hits of recipe and find that to be irrelevant when another user would be looking exactly for pot roast recipes.  (10) It is important to understand that no search query is perfect.  The more that users post on the internet and deposit into online repositories, the more information that will be available for search queries to scour and, hopefully, produce better results.