Resource Pointers

I was vexed to see that there was a bug in the software at the INFORMS Resources Page that sprung up in the transition to a new machine at INFORMS Online.  For the past two months, no submission to the system was being logged.  The worst part is that no one seemed to notice!

This system used to be “Michael Trick’s Operations Research Page”, and was, I think, a key resource on the web in OR/MS.  Now, with the advent of google, it is unclear what role these resource collections have.  If you know roughly what you are looking for, simply googling terms seems the right way to find things.  If you don’t, however, these resource collections can be useful.  But they are incredibly painful to keep up to date (about 15% of the pointers at the site are not valid, but keeping on top of them takes a lot of time).  Two-thirds of the submissions are not OR/MS related, so the editing process is pretty tedious.  So is the effort worth the usefulness, or is this just another aspect of the web that had its time?

2 thoughts on “Resource Pointers”

  1. 1. I came across your resource page several years ago; dimly recall it being some years after leaving grad school (Sep ’94), that would make it the 96-97 timeframe?
    2. The resource page is incredibly useful, especially in the age of Google. Sometimes I don’t know enough to use the right search words, and combing through the huge number of pages that a Google search produces is daunting.
    3. Maybe the resource page could/should evolve to a wiki? Larger community, actively contributing to updates and maintenance?

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