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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

GALE: It's Like That Scene from The Matrix . . .

. . . "Guns. Lots of guns."
                               --Neo.


Man. I wonder if GALE watched this film before they designed their search descriptions for going through the NCCO--cause that's the image I got when I read about searching through information.

Love it.

Here's my question though, and I don't mean it as a cop-out, considering what we do as researchers: although GALE has an advisory board full of credentialed individuals giving advice on what is truly worth digitizing, how much worth can we attribute to obscure receipts of payment for workers?

Meh--I'm digressing--let's get back to the matter of form, not content. 

The thing that strikes me most about the GALE promotional material is the oft repeated mentioning of millions of files/pages/scanned/available. They have MILLIONS of images to sift through. (See the clip above). I guess there will always be someone out there interested in even the most obscure piece of data. I would like to run an algorithm (maybe using the Textual Analysis Tool (http://gale.cengage.co.uk/ncco-technology.aspx)) to see what percentage of the millions of files are searched on a regular basis, and what percentage never get searched.


RANDOM THOUGHT: what about current newspaper worth? Most newspapers today have digital counterparts, but they look much different than the online pieces, and I don't know if newspapers keep scanned images of the physical newspaper. Will we look back in one hundred years, or longer, and find value in the Indiana Gazette's Thursday newspaper from October 15th, 2012? I suppose that's where the advisory board comes into play . . .


I did really like the Term Cluster engine, that allows a user to sink deeper and deeper into key terms and ideas. As the behind the scenes video said, tools like this allow for faster research, resulting in more time for analysis.

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