Project Proposal - The Power of Search meets the Credibility of Librarians by Jeffrey Penka, OCLC (Oct 1, 2008)
Here is more about the proposal for Reference Extract as a new web search engine that would be built using the " expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe." The project has received funding frm the MacArthur Foundation.
From the article:
"Reference Extract seeks to add another dimension to search—credibility. Reference Extract takes the success of the page rank approach and uses it to highlight credible (not just popular) sites. It does this by using the judgments of a high credibility population, librarians, to determine which sites are searched, and the order of the search results."
Article refers to the Librarians' Internet Index as a service that is highly regarded for credibility. One of its shortcomings was that it didn't add enough resources to expand its scope. This article must have been written before it was known that LII also didn't get enough funding to even survive.
Nonetheless, this project will proceed to develop plans over the next few months specifically "to aggregate the citation patterns of reference librarians into a general purpose search engine". Other OCLC sources - books - could be tied in.
The aim is admirable. But what will be the financial model after the funding is gone?
Thanks to Odette for the link.