Walt Crawford schrieb:
>
> Alphabetic order is reasonably predictable for most people whose native
> language uses latin characters. If you're plowing through a favorite
> author's books, you can check holdings against the list you brought with
> you (or that's in your other browser window). Does that make it the
> "best" sort order? Not necessarily--but "relevance" for bibliographic
> records is, I believe, a chimera, and last-in-first-out is frequently a
> mystery.
>
Alphabetic order is of course chaotic and random when your "order"
concept implies any kind of ranking or a logical arrangement.
When looking at an alphabetical listing what you do is browing.
Libraries have often been praised as a great source for new ideas, and
that's more often than not because they encourage browsing and enable
serendipity. The chaos of the alphabet brings stuff to your attention
that would otherwise not get there. So does amazoogle, by the way,
using different sorts of chaotic arrangements.
Browsing is not actually a method of information seeking as it involves
a lot of chance. But libraries are doing well in encouraging it, in
the shelves as well as in the catalog.
Some catalogs have alphabetical lists for browsing: titles, names,
headings, keywords. All catalogs should have these, but not all
do. Search engines generally don't have them. Sometimes, searching
without the aid of browsing lists is groping in the dark. Browsing
lists make you aware of not just what there is but also what there
is not. Or what differs from the spelling you thought was right and
thus wouldn't have hit just firing off your wrong search term.
And so on.
Make browsing lists a requirement for next generation catalogs.
Regards, B. Eversberg.
Received on Thu Jun 15 2006 - 07:03:13 EDT