Casey says...
>Ross,
>What you've illustrated here is the difference between we think
is important and what
>our users (and Amazon's customers) care about.
No, it illustrates that most people don't do a great deal of thinking
about how to best find known items because it's not part of their job
description to do so. I couldn't begin to describe what makes a good
stent, but if I need one, my cardiologist had better be able to figure
it out. A good catalog will lead me along author tracings the same way
my doctor does the stent shopping for me...
>It would seem that we should either enrich our author info with
more detail or relax
>our position on author authorities. But our current situation
is that we're spending
>a lot of money on something that our users (as judged by
Amazon's lack of investment
>in that area) don't value.
Detail, si! Relax, nunca!
Amazon's lack of investment reflects the fact that good name authorities
*are hard to do*. That also explains why ours in libraryland aren't
better sometimes. Amazon gets away with it because: 1) users are used
to "satisficing" on the web and 2) their universe (just books *in print*
from relatively major presses) is small enough to keep author searches
from completely collapsing into uselessness.
Sometimes web things are done with purpose (I'll bet that one search box
on Google wasn't accidental), but sometimes it's just because of
economic constraints or because the developer didn't know any better.
We should never fall into the trap of thinking something is the "best"
way just because vendor X happens to do it like that this year...
Ed Sperr
Digital Services Consultant
NELINET, Inc.
153 Cordaville Rd. Suite 200 Southborough, MA
(508) 597-1931 | (800) 635-4638 x1931
Received on Thu May 31 2007 - 08:24:59 EDT