Google's New Deals Promise to Realize a 60-Year-Old Vision, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). An unsigned essay. On how Google will realize the vision of Vannevar Bush for associative indexing. Excerpt: 'To Mr. Bush, the challenge was not storage. Books already did that job marvelously. The looming crisis, according to Mr. Bush, was a breakdown in the system for indexing and retrieving ideas...."Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it," Mr. Bush wrote. "And this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential."...What was needed, according to Mr. Bush, was a new kind of indexing to create an information revolution. He called it "associative indexing" -- "the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. ... The process of tying two items together is the important thing."...So the Google deals are revolutionary....With its focus on providing simple ways for users to snatch useful information out of billions of pages of data, Google could make something like Mr. Bush's vision of "associative indexing" a reality....Andries van Dam, a computer-science professor at Brown University who was involved in the early work on hypertext systems in the 1960s, says that search engines are already more sophisticated than Mr. Bush envisioned because he imagined that associative indexing would need to be done by hand, as researchers noticed connections among concepts.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2005 11:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
