Today was the last day of our week- long staff training institute. The annual programming helps us to sharpen our saws and bring our knowledge about ourselves and our profession to one another. This year each of our library programs (née departments) was asked to design the programming. Today our social sciences, sciences and business program invited our Alexander Street Press representative to join us and talk about the offerings and new platform.
The rep began talking about the ASP semantic searching and philosophy, and in the course of discussing the application and design use the term "semantic silos". Boy and howdy was I concerned. When I think of silos I think of information held captive and separate from users and uses. Yet she went on to talk about the need to use the discipline or collection specific terms and searching. Cross searching the collections is important yet abusing able to narrow and drill down with known, discipline specific terms and indexing is a big part of the power for the product.
As a user of streaming video I am happy to learn the application will be checking my (and my users') bandwidth to ensure that buffering is minimized or elimated based on the actual capability of the network connection. Selective snipping is also a possibility.
So where does this leave me as an instructor? I envision being able to advocate for the use of the resource with the teachers in the ACE program here on campus. The important piece is making the content availability known to the broad audience of users, and for respecting the useful silos that make searching more productive.
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