Visibility and findability
The visibility of a given document in libraries, in databases, in references of other documents etc. is important in relation to whether or not it is identified by the users who have a potential need for it.
One important endeavor in the library and information community is the establishing of bibliographic control. All problems related to concepts such as metadata, subject data and indexing are concerned with is concerned with the visibility of documents.
In scholarly and scientific documentation it is an implicit
condition that knowledge should not, as in
mass-media, be made visible by commercial marketing. The implicit condition
is rather that knowledge should be organized by integration in well organized
subject structures, which are based on scholarly rather than on commercial
criteria.
The term "findability" was introduced by Peter Morville.
Literature:
Dewey, B. I. (1999). In search of services: Analyzing the findability of links on CIC university libraries' Web pages. Information Technology and Libraries, 18(4), 210-213.
Morville,
P. (2005). Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become.
Sebastopol, CA:
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Toub, S. E. (1997). Adding value to Internet collections. Library Hi Tech,
15(3-4),SI, 148-154.
Zhao, D. (2005). Challenges of scholarly publications on
the Web to the evaluation of science—A comparison of author visibility on the Web and in print journals.
Information Processing & Management, 41(6), 1403-1418.
White, M. (2004). It's not just about searching - It's about findability.
Econtent, 27(7-8), 41-41.
---
See also: Bibliographic control;
Metadata (Lifeboat KO).
Birger Hjørland
Last updated 01-03-2008