I may have had a good idea
Over at my fellow student Nichole’s there’s a comment discussion about the Amazon book-search gizmo.
Frankly, I didn’t (and don’t) think much of it, for the signal-to-noise problem pointed out in Nichole’s comments.
But then I had an idea that might just actually be good. What about back-of-book indexes? Wouldn’t it be wizard cool to be able to search those en masse, and have book titles along with the index entries (to check scope of references) returned?
(Actually, now that I think about it, I’d want number of pages in book, too. It isn’t necessarily absolute page count that helps determine whether a book has a lot or a little on a given subject; it’s ratio of index references to book length. And in a library, obviously I’d want this integrated with the OPAC, so I can have the call number and all that good stuff.)
I mean, when I go research something—and I’m sure I’m not alone in this—I scribble down a list of possible sources, go find ’em, and immediately check their indexes. This index-searching gizmo would cut a long way down on the time I spend on the first two tasks.
This would be dead easy to do; even converting indexes is relatively easy because they’re so structured. And it’d be an electronic window into print sources, something we all seem to want but aren’t sure how to build.
Did I just have a good idea? Somebody tell me what’s wrong with it, quick!
Alternately, somebody hand me some venture capital…