Clearly we've got different definitions of browse going on here. To me,
browsing means a kind of wandering, some movement among things. One kind
of that movement can be the alphabetical movement through bibliographic
headings (or "access points" as RDA is now calling them). This is what
we are most familiar with, but I only find it useful in very limited
circumstances. It is entirely linear (no branching out), and you have to
want to browse by the left-anchored string. As I said, there are a few
circumstances in which I find that useful, but I think it's very
constrained. I want to browse by other aspects: by "sameness" (from the
most alike to the least like my starting point), by "references"
(following citations that link texts), and by classification. These
browses would be more meaningful to me and would help me find
relationships between works that don't happen to be alphabetical.
kc
Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> Andrew Nagy schrieb:
>>
>> At the current moment, you can browse by clicking on the "Browse the
>> Catalog" link in the footer of the page.
>> What that does is views the top 10 of a few categories.
> That's decidedly not what I was getting at. A true index will show _all_
> the entries, and specifically those that are not mainstream.
>
>> Trust me when I say: you do not want to have a list of all of the
>> authors from your catalog. It will be a mile long. :)
>>
> That's entirely beside the point. I want to see _all_ the entries in the
> _vicinity_ of what I enter, be it a name, a title string, or (above all)
> a subject term. The vicinity, that's what's important for browsing, it's
> what browsing's all about - to find things you were'nt aware of they
> existed, or when got the spelling wrong or there are variant spellings.
> (No, software can't catch them all for you.)
> I suggest you read Thomas Mann's paper and ponder his examples, he puts
> things a lot better than I can say it. Esp. about subject headings.
> There, a browsable index (a real index showing all the terms there are)
> is absolutely indispensable for any catalog worth its salt.
>
>> But VuFind is open source ... it is up to the community to make it
>> better.
>>
> Then here's a challenge.
>
> B.Eversberg
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Sat Jul 21 2007 - 09:37:20 EDT