Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!sri-unix!garth!fenwick
From: fenwick@garth.UUCP (Stephen Fenwick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <1804@garth.UUCP>
Date: 8 Nov 88 21:23:33 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp> <557@metapsy.UUCP> <13203@andante.UUCP> <26543@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <4105@encore.UUCP>
Reply-To: fenwick@garth.UUCP (Stephen Fenwick)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 23

In article <4105@encore.UUCP> bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>The point of putting books on-line is not to ensure you never read in
>bed again, it's to make them accessible to new generations of tools,
>for the researchers, writers and curious of the world.
>
>[ very sound example of the need for automated library search capabilities ]

The only problem with this is keeping everything on file in a manner that
allows users to find what they need.  This is non-trivial, as the information
content of a work may not be limited by the author's conception of the its
content.  Watch the PBS series "Connections" to see what I mean.  Machines
are currently very good a fast data retrieval, but decidedly bad at making
inferences about the data that they store.

Steve Fenwick

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