Authority 3.0 tomorrow and 5th gen search today

Michael Jensen of the National Academies Press has written a thought-provoking piece about scholarship and web 2.o in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority [ACRLog]

From it, I learned of NAP's ReferenceFinder:

designed to take a large block of text (from an article, a rough draft of a paper, a book chapter, a news story), and use it intelligently to "find more like it."

I tried it out using my last NJL post and from that text, it extracted key terms for searching Google Scholar and other sources and presented me with books and reports related to the text I gave it.

The National Academies Press is not afraid of web 2.0. Their business is publishing scholarly works in the sciences, engineering, and medicine and they do this all while making these same resources freely available page-by-page on the web.