Soooo – Why can’t I search the content of all North American (or international) public library sites in one place? I’m not talking about their catalogues or OpenWorldCat. I mean their pages. How do we easily find all the cool stuff that public libraries have done?
We used to have it by embeding metatags on the page headers, but the technology got so much over used by spammers and so much underrated by the search engines (the Search Engine Optimization industry was born to tweak metatags) that we lost that possibility.
Nowdays, with the loss of authority the social web envisages ( everybody can be an authority on anything ) we are even more lost.
In my country, usually a Public Library will be adressed on the internet by www.bm-TownNameGoesHere.pt but it does not solve anything.
A new 2nd level domain notation could do the trick: *.lib.us, *.lib.pt, etc … but that’s a political decision at the IETF level (I think)… after all the universities filter is acomplished by the .edu ( and .ac.uk, etc ) tricks.
On 2nd thougth a social tag scheme could be adopted, whereby the user comunity would tag sites as public library where one could search for the tag link ( eg: link:www.technorati.com/tag/PublicLibrary senior citizens services on a google seach box.
Problem: how does the www.technorati.com/tag/PublicLibrary become authoritative?
How big is the public library universe? Can a grant be established for a team of people (who have reputations to loose) to do the tagging?
How about a request for credibility beeing sent from the library to a central body (IFLA? PLA?) who acredits the library site with a certification graphic and link? This can’t be dificult… porno and dating sites do it all the time…
The end objective is that users of google and yahoo and msn ( thus 99.99999% of search engine market) have almost absolute certainty that sites with link:www.technorati.com/tag/PublicLibrary are public library sites….
