in perl, a regular expression begins and ends with the same character, though conventionally, it is a slash, /.

/.*/, then, means a regular expression matching .*, where . means ‘any character’ and * means ‘any number of times’.

so /.*/ means ‘anything’ or ‘everything’, in the language of regular expressions.

iii allows the use of regular expressions in some of the behind-the-scenes tools, but generally, library searching uses some other kind of wildcard character - * or ? to mean “anything” or “truncate”.

in a database, you might use dog* to match ‘dog’, ‘dogs’ or ‘doggerel’ in a database, the regular expression /dog*/ would match dog, dogg, doggg, dogggg, and on and on to infinite g’s. infinite g’s: it’s like science fiction gangsta rap. to match ‘dog’ or ‘dogs’, you would use /dogs?/, where the ? indicates “0 or 1 time”, and applies to the character immediately before, so ‘dog’, with or without an s on the end, but not ‘doggonnit’.

see? nerd.

i’m not really an expert in this, but i know enough to get into trouble, and to crack jokes about it. the main problem, for people like me, is that because i know how to use this tool, i use it even when a simpler tool would work more efficiently. this is okay for hacking, but can be dangerous for Real Programming.

i think if traffic increased, new questions would go around around until they got answered. patrons who waited too long would disconnect. could we make it grow on it’s own? i dunno. that part needs people to participate.

you could program a mini-brain to take into consideration whatever you want it to. it could consider subject expertise, why not? but i hope it wouldn’t. nothing to me indicates that patrons come to collaborative virtual reference services looking for subject expertise. i can’t recall ever seeing a patron complain that their librarian wasn’t expert in the right subject, or praise a librarian’s skills in a particular area. but hey, who wants to help write an article? i have six years of surveys we could study.

not to say that subject expertise isn’t valuable, just that you can’t expect patrons to negotiate it. if you want to tell people that you can improve their lives by answering any question, you can’t say, ‘um well, really, i only want you to ask questions that i am an expert at answering’.

but librarians like the power and authority that subject expertise gives us, so we are drawn to create systems with some kind of subject-related central controller.

see for example the library of congress’ ‘ask a librarian’ page. http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/

this goes for physical arrangements also - can you think of any reason why a building should have fifteen service points that patrons should have to choose from when they ask their question? no, the logic there should be to make help available in every corner of the space, regardless of the subject of the query. and the same it should be online.

And what’s /.*/.?