I had the great good fortune of being on a panel with Roger Summit at the SLA conference, and was struck with how innovative Roger was. When he invented Dialog, the idea of interactive searching and of documents being access remotely was completely new to the info pro industry. So I started thinking of how I would describe the new Dialog of 1966 in 2012 terms.
"Remote terminal access" to electronic resources is the cloud computing of the 1960s. Being able to query a database across the country, and then download the results, was revolutionary. In fact, early "downloading" amounted to issuing a Type command and advancing the teletype machine's paper to a new page.
Roger was asked what he would have developed had he been starting today rather than in the 1960s, and his answer was delightful. "Empathy software" -- a front-end to any search tool that would serve as a good, empathic librarian, ask the user some questions to discern the underlying question, then construct a query that would best extract that information. This seems fitting; he is imagining how to make an interactive search service more meaningfully interactive.
I don't see anything on the horizon that truly addresses the question of how to take a vaguely-formed information gap and find the underlying information need. IBM's Watson is perhaps the closest alternative, although it (he?) has a ways to go before it can be deployed within libraries and information centers.
At the recent SLA meeting Mary Ellen was the first to speak on our panel entitled: "Thriving in the Age of Empowered End Users/How can information professionals redefine their service offering and their value proposition?."
By the time she had finished speaking, Mary Ellen had so brilliantly covered the topic that the rest of us found very little to add.
The panel discussion will soon be available from:
http://www.youtube.com/user/proquestvideo/videos?view=0
Posted by: Roger Summit | July 24, 2012 at 08:25 AM
Also, you're so right on about cloud computing. Simply a new name for a prior process but with some new and important wrinkles.
Posted by: Roger Summit | September 23, 2012 at 08:15 AM