David,
This was humorous, right? But there's more than a grain of truth to it...
Amazon's search capabilities are infuriatingly lacking! - for example,
with a search for classical music (try prokofiev 2nd piano concerto), or
an artist or author with a common name, or a title with common words.
Granted I'm usually looking for something a bit obscure, not the latest
Mariah Carey record. And any kind of subject searching - forget about it.
I want to be able to sort results by date of issue or by title, but I
get a few "ranked" most popular items at the top and then lots of
trawling. I want to be able to limit to the format I want, and not
have the dozens of audiobook versions of Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone obscure the rare edition I'm hunting.
If I want to buy classical music, I usually go to ArkivMusic, use their
browse feature to find recordings of works, then check prices against
Amazon. Or try a library catalog.
I'm not saying OPACs are perfect in these areas, but some are better :-)
Amazon's "suggestions" of things I'd like based on my buying history are
not very intuitive. Only rarely does it suggest something I'd want to
buy that I didn't already know about.
What Amazon is good for: "look inside the book", sample sound files,
and especially, reviews and user comments. I often go there to see what
people have said about a particular thing, even if I already own it. I
don't necessarily buy there if I can find the item cheaper elsewhere (at
a vendor that has even less search capability and no extras).
Libraries' goals are different from Amazon's purpose (we don't sell
things) but we have some purposes in common (want to let people know
what's available, give them enough information to help them decide
whether they want to get it, and make it easy for them to get it).
Amazon has an enormous collection that's inaccessible to its customers -
their "online catalog" is the only way in. Large academic libraries are
increasingly storing their print collection in inaccessible locations.
We need to find out how to enhance our catalogs to give people a better
idea of what's there, and we need to figure out how to let the users
help other users.
But, please don't chuck out the "advanced search". Show people how
they can use it - and make it "reliable" - and look for ways to do better.
I think users of Amazon and Google put up with trawling through a lot of
unhelpful results because they use those services for other reasons
(comprehensiveness, "ranking", free content), and that's the best
"search" those services can provide right now - but that will change.
Laura
--
*Laura Akerman
Technology and Metadata Librarian
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Room 128
Emory University
Atlanta, Ga. 30322
phone (404) 727-6888
fax 404-727-0053*
David Walker wrote:
>A lot of bright and talented people have argued for years now that our
>OPACs need to be more like Google and Amazon.
>
>I think we need to do the exact opposite: Let us pool our resources and
>lobby Google and Amazon to make their systems more like the OPAC!
>
>Here is a demo of what I'm talking about:
>
>http://library2.csusm.edu/amazon/
>
>
>Just think how much better Amazon could be if they took this approach!
>Feel free to file this under "Bad or inappropriate uses of the Amazon
>Web Services API." ;-)
>
>--Dave
>
>=========================
>David Walker
>Web Development Librarian
>Library, Cal State San Marcos
>760-750-4379
>http://public.csusm.edu/dwalker
>=========================
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 12 2006 - 08:59:20 EDT