IP: letter to NYT wrt article on "how I came to hate push"

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Eugene Garfield, Ph.D.              =20
Chairman Emeritus
E-mail:garfield () aurora cis upenn edu                     =20
Home Page:http://165.123.33.33/eugene_garfield
Fax: (215)387-1266


April 14, 1997


To:
The Editor
The New York Times


Dear Sir:


In her article on "... how I came to hate push technology," (The New York
Times, p.C5, March 24, 1997)  Denise Caruso  speculates whether "Push
Technology"  signals the doom of the Web browser.  However, on March 23,
1997 in "Pushy, Pushy," New York Times Magazine (p.32), James Gleick
provides a cogent response.  My experience with "Push Pull" technology may
be of interest. =20


In 1965 Irving H. Sher and I created Research Alert, the first commercially
available computer-based system for selective dissemination of information
(SDI)1.  Since then the service has been operated continuously on a weekly
basis by the Institute for Scientific Information=E2 (ISI).  The key to its
success is timing, comprehensiveness, and high degree of specificity.
Since the early seventies DIALOG, Lexis-Nexis, and other on-line systems
have also provided "Push Pull" technology.  The success of SDI services is
based on their highly selective profiling systems.  Unless "Push
Technology" or current Web "crawlers"  do the same, they will frustrate
most users.  Significantly improved search engines will make Web browsers
increasingly valuable, even while equally improved SDI (Push) systems gain
popularity. =20


Pointcast and other broadly based systems are relatively useless to most
users but they can become highly specific, as they are  with individual
stocks.=20


The needs of scientists, medical researchers, and scholars are quite varied
and only systems that can provide the ability to customize literature
searching will be used repeatedly.  Broader dissemination is provided by
such tools as Current Contents and Medline, and hundreds of leading
specialty journals.


Profiling systems are widely used in the information industry to follow
patent, journal, and other literature.  The level of specificity needed
often involves complex combinations of descriptors, but also the ability to
identify current publications that quote specific papers and people.
Existing Web "crawlers" do not provide an acceptable level of precision and
convenience, but competition will force them to rediscover what the library
and information community has known for over three decades.


Sincerely yours,




Eugene Garfield, Ph.D.
Chairman Emeritus
Institute for Scientific Information
3501 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104


cc : Denise Caruso
cc : James Gleick


1.  Garfield, E. and Sher, I. "ASCA (Automatic Subject Citation Alert) -- a
new
     personalized current awareness service for scientists", American
Behavioral=20
     Scientist,10(5), 29-32, January 1967.
=20