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Howlers: New Automation and Human
Models Challenge Traditional Indexing |
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25 April 2005 |
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Professionals of many stripes came
together at the workshop on current and future
trends in indexing held by the National
Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS)
in New York last week to get a handle on what's creating
value in indexing today. The session made clear that
publishers who have long relied on high-quality indexing to
bring in revenues are not having much fun in an environment
that increasingly favors the ad hoc over long
established content structure for bringing in profits. The
future of professional indexers may be smaller in terms of
their pre-automated past, but these same tools are also
providing new opportunities for both professional indexers
and their users - those "howlers" - to create more content
value. |
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The National
Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS)
is an interesting collection of institutions and publishers
joining to tackle issues in aggregating content through
indexing, abstracts and leading content technologies. While
there are certainly a good number of indexing experts in this set
there are also many executives in businesses and other
publishing institutions who are trying to wrestle indexing
issues to the ground that are critical to their success as
publishers. NFAIS as an organization sees clearly how
The New Aggregation is changing the way in which content
value is being created, and many of its members do also. But at
a recent daylong workshop on "Automated
Indexing & Abstracting: Current Status and Future Trends"
it was clear that new takes on indexing are needed to succeed
in today's content marketplace. Content products long centered
on the value of traditional indexing and abstracting are
struggling, daunted by the rise of automated indexing and
search systems implemented by their clients and open Web search
engines. Content indexing and categorization tools and taxonomy specialists
are thriving in and of themselves, but the value that they
provide has a hard time keeping up with the expectations of a
generation of users trained by Web search interfaces.
Who's really controlling the future of content indexing
value? Increasingly it's the "howlers," as one person described
them at the NFAIS session, active electronic content users who
are involved in improving our ability to find it. Traditionally
this has meant users providing feedback to editorial or support
staffs on how documents get sifted into well-established
categories, catching what indexers perceive as errors or
"noise." Professional indexers test and try new concepts
and terms over time before adding them to controlled
vocabularies. This leads to thinking that the "noise" of
"misplaced" content is missing the point when in fact it may be
the indexers who are missing the point. Increasingly the needs
and interests of users trying to keep ahead of competitors and
rivals move faster than established taxonomies and categories,
with victories going to those who can divine the profits in new
patterns before the next outfit, especially in rapidly blending
global markets. The "howlers" at the edge of these changes who
point to content with links and act to organize it themselves
are pointing the way towards a new future for content
organization.
Here are a few quick thoughts about where indexing's power
is moving in a world of "howlers":
- Indexing as a social phenomenon is still on the edges
of the indexing profession. A lot of the excitement
surrounding services such as
del.icio.us
is lost on professional indexers, with some good reason.
Collaborative indexing is hardly a replacement for
well-structured indexing methodologies when you're trying to
create content that can respond to authoritative needs of
fact-based content systems. But all humans want to categorize
things, to make sense out of chaos in a context that has
social value as well as logical structure. This is not
really so much a battle between absolutism and relativism as
it is a struggle to have indexers accept that a community's
view of what creates that structure may be less relativistic
than a small cadre of people not tuned into the latest
thinking of the users who they serve. Socially-driven indexing's output may be oftentimes trendy and narrow in
scope, but oftentimes that's a virtue in helping people find
content that's in the mainstream of a community's thinking.
Score one for social networks of "howlers."
- The value in content indexing is moving from "recall"
to "precision." Being able to have an indexing system
capture nothing but "good stuff" on a given topic - "recall," as
the experts call it - has been the cornerstone of publishing
value through indexing for a long time. Yet as highlighted at
the NFAIS session by
Craig Emerson, Vice President of Editorial Operations at CSA,
publishers' business models based on this kind of indexing
expertise are not paying the bills like they used to.
Scientific publishers in particular are challenged both by
enterprise search engines and open Web search engines such as
The National Library of Medicine's
PubMed and Google Scholar that emphasize "precision"
- the ability to find all the "good stuff", even if it means
a little of the "noise" that may turn out to be useful after
all in the eyes of a searcher. Precision-based systems that
can use the input of subject matter expert "howlers" to
refine rapidly shifting bodies of knowledge are winning the
battle for content value in many instances.
- Automated Indexing is creating a powerful new
generation of indexers. Far from eliminating indexing as
a profession and an art, the proliferation of powerful
software tools to aid indexers in automated indexing is
empowering them to focus on the most critical aspects of
indexing to improve performance. While in the transition to
these tools redundancies increase as efficiencies improve,
those who are sharp enough to take advantage of powerful
programmable indexing systems such as Access Innovation's Data
Harmony suite will thrive. But it also means that new types
of "experts" can enter the indexing fray using tools such as
Verity's K2 Profiler to allow distributed groups closer to
the needs of specific communities of users to adapt indexing
and taxonomies to more localised needs. This allows both
corporations and publishing organizations such as the IEEE to
create content more usable according to local and specialized
terms cost-effectively in parallel with indexing more in line
with broad industry standards. Blending the best of
both rules-based indexing tools and content categorization
driven by front-line users is a key bridge towards getting
the "howlers" leveraging the best of existing indexing
techniques and the power of Web-based collaborative thinking.
There is still a lot of mileage in traditional indexing
approaches, but increasingly indexing systems are inputs into
much more sophisticated content organization tools needed to
support a wide variety of content retrieval and organization
needs. Indexing will continue to be a highly profitable
endeavor when it responds to a user base that is highly
empowered by today's content technologies. As long as they're
all howling off of the same sheet of music, that should make
for some pretty handsome noise.
-
John Blossom
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