Throughout the course of history, some of the most successful, cutting-edge, avant-garde innovations have arisen not through pure invention but rather by rediscovering the values and schemas of established methods and then combining the tried and true with new ideas and technologies. In this same vein, of interest to Journal of Internet Cataloging readers is the development of an innovative cataloging system that combines older standards and technology with the Internet and with new ideas. The function of this system is to track, via a cataloging database, the names and research interests of bio-medical faculty members at the New York University School of Medicine. The creative result is the school’s Faculty Research Catalog (FRC). The FRC is Web accessible. It also harnesses one of the standard, but less explored formats found in the library world’s MARC flat file landscape--the MARC 21 Format for Community Information--as well as a standard medical thesaurus (MeSH), other normal library routines such as checking headings for consistency of form within the database, and the ability to merge data from elsewhere. Figuratively speaking, this makes for an island paradise among database Web sites on the Internet. In sum, the Faculty Research Catalog is portable, flexible, readily updated, vocabulary-controlled and hot-linked to faculty members’ natural language descriptions of their own work on their own Web sites, all of which strengthens the relevancy of searching results and streamlines ease of use. To learn more about the New York University School of Medicine’s exciting Internet database project we interviewed Robert F. McDonald, M.A., M.S., Assistant Curator, and Associate Director for Collection Services of the NYU School of Medicine Library in November, 1999. As a cataloging and technical services specialist he has been a key player in this very practical, state-of -the-art, and quite unique database cataloging project.
Monika Henzinger is Director of Research at Google in Mountain View, California. Monika received her Ph.D. from Princeton University with a specialization in algorithms and data structures. She was an assistant professor at Cornell before moving to California. Hired by Digital Equipment Corporation, she began working with information retrieval and the Web. She met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google co-founders, at weekly Web information retrieval meetings they held at Stanford University. After Larry and Sergey started Google, they asked Monika to join the company. She has been at Google since October 1999.
Google
was founded by Stanford Ph. D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.
It has since grown to nearly 100 employees, and is consistently ranked
among the top search engines on the Web. Google
is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number represented by 1
followed by 100 zeros. This immense
number reflects the company mission of organizing the immense amount of
information available on the Web.
On March 27, 2000 at Google Headquarters, Monika gave an interview to the Journal of Internet Cataloging, focusing on search engines, their technology and use. Monika discusses the origins of Google and their ranking algorithm that evaluates the relevance of retrieved documents. She gives tips on query formulation and on how users can focus or expand their queries using other Google features. She also discusses some areas for further research and describes how the public sector is essential in furthering research into the Internet. Even in this new environment, search engine designers are running into the same issues of user behavior and query analysis that librarians have been wrestling with for years.