- From: <weibel@oclc.org>
- Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 08:24:38 -0400
- To: uri@bunyip.com
A parable of modern technology gone wrong. The Ohio State University Health Science Library was built in the mid 70's around an abominable piece of technology-run-amok called the RandTriever... a mechanical book storage system that required looking up a call number, giving it to a reference clerk who, in turn, matched it with an accession number (an undifferentiated string of 10 or 12 numeric characters), which, in turn, was entered via keyboard to retrieve the desired object. Among the *MANY* deficiencies of this system was the need for people to enter such numbers without error. Something like 30% of the failures to retrieve had simply to do with this human-hostile resource identifier being mistyped. URIs (and I assume we are talking about URNs here) should be amenable to handling by humans.
Received on Friday, 11 August 1995 12:48:58 UTC