My talk yesterday on Searching, Finding and the Information Professional was surprisingly crowded, given the other very strong sessions happening concurrently with mine. If I could have cloned myself, I would have been in multiple rooms that afternoon. My basic points were that our clients think about searchability and findability differently than we info pros do, which is good, because it keeps us employed. I also talked about newer developments in web search, such as personalization, optimization, semantic clustering, automatic indexing, metadata, and the "invisible" web. I ended up with some thoughts about nontextual, nontraditional information. And I showed some photos I took at the InfoTubey award ceremonies.
Somewhere in there I mentioned the traditional search strategies of pearl growing, successive fractions, and building blocks. One attendee asked me for the exact citation of the seminal article in ONLINE that introduced those concepts. I didn’t know it off the top of my head, but now I’ve looked it up. Here’s the citation: "Online Bibliographic Search Strategy Development," by Donald Hawkins (yes, that’s one of my fellow bloggers here at the InfoTodayBlog!!) and Robert Wagers, ONLINE, v. 6, n. 3, May 1982. It’s old enough that I don’t think the full text is available electronically. Sorry bout that.
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
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