Search Strategies White Papers

The New Context for Bibliographic Control in the New Millennium

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• search strategies,
• techniques,
• search,
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Overview Supporting the identification of works of interest is not the only purpose of bibliographic control, but it is certainly one of the most important and most widely relied-upon. In this paper I will consider the ways in which information finding is changing in a world of digital information and associated search systems, with particular focus on methods of locating information that are distinct from, but complementary to, established practices of bibliographic description. A full understanding of these developments is essential in re-thinking bibliographic control in the new millennium, because they fundamentally change the roles and importance of bibliographic metadata in information discovery processes.

There are three major approaches to finding information: through bibliographic surrogates, that represent an intellectual description of aspects and attributes of a work; through computational, content-based techniques that compare queries to parts of the actual works themselves; and through social processes that consider works in relationship to the user and his or her characteristics and history, to other works, and also to the behavior of other communities of users.

The first approach is familiar, and forms the basis of catalogs and abstracting and indexing, and more recently online catalogs and similar systems. The third approach is also familiar, in the form of book reviews, citation indexes, and suggestions from colleagues, but is now seeing a great creative expansion in the digital world, with its ability to create and aggregate world-wide communities of interest and to track the behavior of users. The second is fundamentally new in the digital world, where techniques based on full text searching form the basis of today's web search engines. We need to recognize that in the new millennium, for digital materials, high quality content-based computational techniques will be an inexpensive, ubiquitous, and rapidly-available default means of searc

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