Having good search results for known */sets/* rather than known items
means good, rational collocation of the items returned for that set.
This is a must for a catalog and something that I think Amazon is rather
poor at. And a known set of items should be more than just the set of
documents that contain a given alphanumeric string, no matter how much
analysis goes into the location and frequency of that string in a
citation [I'm alluding to controlled vocab here].
Hence the chaos that comes back from searching Amazon for something as
simple as Charles Dickens. Takes me 3 screens to come across one of his
more obscure novels, /Dombey and Sons. /If I don't know the name of that
particular item and just want a list of his works to parse through,
Amazon fails miserably. Try figuring out how many novels Dickens wrote
from Amazon. But try doing it from a catalog too. Not easy to do from
either platform. But maybe this is the kind of thing we should not be
expecting either a catalog or Amazon to be answering. Either could point
us to a source that could likely answer said question.
From a power user point of view, Amazon also fails. I buy books in
several areas and one of them is polymer chemistry. Amazon is nearly
worthless for high-end set development like this. There isn't remotely
enough granularity in its categories to enable real sifting of content.
Granted - this kind of looking likely isn't done by the public or
undergrads - but it is done by faculty and researchers. So, like Emily
said, if you are gonna dumb down the front-end, you better be
compensating by making the back-end smarter. But again, how smart should
it be? I don't expect Amazon to function the way a high-end collection
tool like GOBI does. But I do expect a catalog to fall somewhere in
between. I need some power functions now and then even as I want the
front-end to be simple to enough that students can use it effectively
without training.
Scott Warren
--
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Scott Warren, M.A. LIS
Assistant Head
Textiles Library and Engineering Services
North Carolina State University Libraries
Box 8301
Raleigh, NC 27695-8301
919-515-6602 (phone)
919-515-3926 (fax)
scott_warren_at_ncsu.edu
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Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 14:14:56 EDT