Does Time Fix All? by Daniel Lemire, starts off:
As an graduate, finding useful references was painful. What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web. Even so, the librarians were slow to adopt the Web and you could often see them warn students against using the Web as part of their research. Some of us ignored them and posted our papers online, or searched for papers online. Many, many years later, we are still a crazy minority but a new generation of librarians has finally adopted the Web.
What do you conclude from this story?
Whenever you point to a difficult systemic problem (e.g., it is time consuming to find references), someone will reply that “time fixes everything”. A more sophisticated way to express this belief is to say that systems are self-correcting.
…
Here is my response:
From above: “… What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web….”
Really?
You mean the librarians who had been working on digital retrieval since the late 1940’s and subject retrieval longer than that? Those librarians?
With the web, every user repeats the search effort of others. Why isn’t repeating the effort of others a “terrible time-consuming system?”
BTW, Berners-Lee invented allowing 404s for hyperlinks. Significant because it lowered the overhead of hyperlinking enough to be practical. It was other CS types with high overhead hyperlinking. Not librarians.
Berners-Lee fixed hyperlinking maintenance, failed and continues to fail on IR. Or have you not noticed?
I won’t amplify my answer here but will wait to see what happens to my comment at Daniel’s blog.