SILS 75th wrap up

I felt under-dressed for the occasion but I was glad to be attending.

Complaining aside the event did make me feel like I am a part of something that matters and is going places. The president of UNC was there, Governor Hunt was there, and some one else who I'll look up later. The un-named guy had some very interesting points and really made me feel even more interested in what I am studying so much so that I feel like a chump for not making more notes while I do my readings.

Dinner and I'll come back to this

One of the things remarked on during one of the speeches was a notion of 'the information' becoming fragmented. So consider all the contents of recored history or every printed document for sake of comparison lets say 1000 units represents everything ever printed. Now we move into the technology age where 1000 books can fit on a cd and there are new books and other formats of recorder history now the history is represented by 1,000,000,000 units.
At this point with the quantity and variety of information on any particular topic available the ability to retrieve all relevent information becomes difficult. If you say give me everything on 1950's gas pumps you might get listings for holdings of patent applications, books of photo collections or some newspaper article detailing some accident, etc. Knowing how to catalog pictures, written documents, scale models, and 3D models of gas pumps is hard to do. Worse is the problem of knowing when to show what pieces of information to the user since no one is going to go beyond the first 3 or 4 pages of results. This is where the fragmentation comes into play.