Room for doubting Thomas

©1995, The Boston Globe

Forgive me for peeking under the king's new clothes, but I've been fooling around a bit with "Thomas," the new Library of Congress computer system that House Speaker Newt Gingrich said would shift the balance of power from the lobbyists to the people.

Thomas, named for our most brilliant and creative president, doesn't do Jefferson justice.

This is in no way meant to suggest there is anything wrong with putting the full text of bills and resolutions on the Internet, as the Library of Congress did when it launched Thomas earlier this month. And I hope Gingrich makes good on his promise not to permit passage of any legislation that hasn't been posted there first for all to see.

Thomas, however, is no great equalizer; he's the lobbyist's best friend.

Lobbyists, congressional staff and those who make it their business to know what's happening on Capitol Hill speak in code like "H.R. 2493, S.J. Res. 53," and if they need to, they know how to find the foreign ownership provisions tucked away in the Agricultural, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Appropriations bill.

Thomas speaks their language and will get them what they want in a split second. He's very fast.

The rest of us may spend forever searching, because if you don't know the bill number, Thomas looks for key words in every document and delivers a list of 100 documents with the most repetitions of those key words. That system, developed by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, makes some very odd choices.

If you ask Thomas to provide any legislation dealing with "elderly black Americans," the first two bills he will report back concern the Black Bear Protection Act. Nearly all the legislation in the next 15 offerings deals with historically black colleges and universities, which are of more interest to the young than the elderly.

You can guess why there are so many bills on the list dealing with black lung disease and the Black Canyon, but why do you suppose the Bucket Drowning Prevention Act is listed? It's not because most babies who drown in buckets are African American, although many of them are. It's because the warning label, had the bill passed, would have been printed in black.

Thomas demonstrates that the great challenge of the Information Age is not merely to gain access to information but to figure out how to manage it. Gingrich, who fancies himself a futurist, ought to understand that. He doesn't answer his e-mail, probably because--like me--he gets more than he can keep up with. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

One example of a genuinely useful search program was developed at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston to help medical professionals sort through the 7 million references to scholarly articles and health-related data collected by the National Library of Medicine.

The program, called PaperChase, doesn't require the user to know precise scientific terms or the formal citations of articles. Instead, it is clever enough to know that stomach pain and gastritis could be the same thing, and it leads the searcher through several levels of "natural language" searches until the choices have been narrowed to a manageable number of relevant articles about a specific condition or complaint.

PaperChase doesn't have Thomas's good looks, and it takes an amateur some time to get the hang of using it, but the program provides a good taste of what properly trained computers can do to help cut through the mountains of information now online. Computer users who don't have direct access to it can reach PaperChase through CompuServe, which charges a premium for the service.

The Thomas problem certainly is not unique. Browsing is fun, but finding something in particular on the Internet's World Wide Web, where Thomas resides, can be a frustrating, time-consuming and ultimately disappointing experience. There are several search tools available, but even they can be hard for newcomers to find, and they frequently locate only a fraction of the material being sought.

It may take me a while, therefore, to adopt Gingrich's zeal for the Internet as a solution to society's ills.

"Somehow," he said recently, "there has to be a missionary spirit in America that says to the poorest child in America, `Internet's for you. The Information Age is for you.' There's an alternative to prostitution, drug abuse and death, and we are committed to reaching every child in this country. And not in two generations or three generations; we're committed this year, we're committed now."

--The Boston Globe, January 27, 1995