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Do you remember the library's original card catalogs, those wooden,
beautifully constructed cabinets full of rows and rows of drawers, each
full of carefully typed index cards? The card catalog contained
PROXIES -- abridged representations of documents, acting as their
surrogate -- for the books it indexed. No one expected the full text of
the books actually to be found in these drawers.
Computerized card
catalogs are only capable of supporting a similiar function. They do
allow more extensive indexing and efficient retrieval, from terminals
that might be accessed far from the library building. At the heart of
this system is a text search engine capable of matching features of a
query against book titles. Just like the original index cards however,
retrieval is limited to some proxy of the indexed work, a bibliographic
citation or perhaps even an abstract. The text of ultimate interest --
in a book, magazine, or journal -- remained physically quite distinct
from the search engine used to find it.
As computer storage capacities
and network communication rates have exploded, it has become
increasingly common to find retrieval systems capable of presenting the
full text of retrieved items. In the modern context, proxies extend
beyond the bibliographic citation information and subject headings we
associate with card catalogs, and include a document's title, an
article's abstract, a judicial opinion's headnote, a book's table of
contents.
The distinction between the search engine retrieving documents
and retrieving proxies remains important, however, for at least two
reasons. First, the radically changing technical capabilities of
libraries (and computers and networks more generally) can create
conceptual confusion about just what the search engine is doing. While
it has been possible for a decade or more to get the full text of
published journal articles through commercial systems such as DIALOG and
Lexis/Nexis, free access to these through your public library would have
been almost unheard of until quite recently. In fact, most libraries did
not even try to index individual articles in their periodical
collections. Changing technical capacities, changes in the application
of intellectual property laws, changes in the library's role, and
resulting changes in the publishing industry are radically altering the
traditional balance. Even when all new publication is easily available
electronically, the issue of { retrospectively} capturing previously
published books and journals remains unresolved.
Looking far into the
future and assuming no technical, economic or legal barriers to a
complete rendering of any document in our corpus, there is still an
important reason to consider document proxies. Recall that FOA is a
{process} we are attempting to support, and that retrieving sets of
documents to show users is a step that we expect to repeat many times.
Proxies are abridged, shortened versions of the documents that are
easier for browsing users to quickly scan and react to (i.e., provide
relevance feedback) than if they had to read the entire document. If a
document's title is accurate (if its abstract is well-written, if its
bibliographic citation is complete), this proxy may provide enough
information for users to decide if it seems relevant.
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Document proxies