On 6/22/06, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> Well, I was actually talking about the appearance, not the
> technical component. And I was saying that SQL indexes
> were not designed to be displayed.
We don't use SQL at all, so that's easy to overcome. :)
> A sorted display of names, titles, etc. may be *based*
> on an internal SQL index, but it *is* not that index, it would
> have to be a separate table.
I think that *lists* of things is exactly what a lot of people would
love to see more of, but that require us to know what lists are
helpful. And A-Z list of authors in a 11 million record OPAC is not a
helpful list, but maybe a list of supranarrowpunk genre books of the
late 60's, perhaps written in Swahili? (And yes, this sound a bit like
tags, doesn't it?)
> or from a lack of demand. The latter seems to be the
> case.
Indeed. There are many *human* unwritten rules here, where "if record
numbers is more than X, I'd like to search, but if below I'd like to
browse." How do we find this magic number? Testing. And that is if it
indeed is something our users want. I have a few use cases where it is
wanted, but they are always quite constrained scenarious.
Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
- Frank Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 17:28:26 EDT