On Wednesday, December 12, 2007 3:18 PM, Chris Barr wrote:
>Try the browse demo here: http://www.vufind.org/demo/Browse/Home
...
>What can we do differently, beyond squashing the bugs, to make the browse
useful for an average user?
I like the options to browse in a number of different ways. The alphabetical
(by author to start) doesn't seem to be fully alphabetical. Once one selects
a starting letter, the results appear to be in number of hits, rather than
alphabetical by heading/name. Also, once one selects a name, the results
appear to be randomly arranged, rather than grouped by heading. For example,
if I choose Author->By Alphabetical->S and then select the 7th name, Smith,
William (83), I get "Showing 1 - 20 of 182 Results for "Smith, William,"".
Off to the side of this page, I do see a link in the Author narrowing
section for "Smith, William, (83)", which does appear to bring back only 83
results. However, it seems to mix all of the headings with "Smith, William,"
together and requires the user to go all the way to the staff view to
determine whether this is "Smith, William,|cSir,|d1813-1893", "Smith,
William,|d1727-1803", "Smith, William,|d1859-1932", or one of the others.
Why don't you include the full heading, along with the ability to limit to a
specific heading, in the initial display? If I know the heading for a
specific person, I might like to look for all of that person's works, and
not have to be bothered with the works of others of the same name.
On a browse search, Aristotle appears in at least 2 places, "Aristotle.
(177)" and "Aristotle (33)" (probably due to the lack of a period at the end
of the field in the 33 records). The narrowing list on the side helps to
show the difference between these headings and limit the results to just
those records. This would help a cataloger identify the records needing to
be revised so that all records by Aristotle appear under only 1 heading
rather than 2.
I hope this helps.
Thank you,
Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x460
bryan.baldus_at_quality-books.com
Received on Wed Dec 12 2007 - 17:02:28 EST