Congrats for delving into this! I believe virtual, flexible browsing can have a major impact on the services libraries provide. I hope both you and others are able to continue to put development time into this area.
Three quick things from my point of view, dealing heavily with non-textual materials and implementing faceted browse for some digital library collections on a smaller-scale than the whole library catalog.
1) The "format" facet isn't available in the initial choices. I would have found it useful to have been there.
2) I found the initial selection interface to be confusing. You select one facet, then a second, then select the *value* for the second facet, then back to selecting the *value* for the first facet. It was very odd. I think an interface more like the "narrow search" (a strange label for a browse result, no?) box on the results screen for both the initial selection and further moving around in the results set would be more effective.
3) Following on that idea, I view browsing as an extremely iterative activity - you don't know what you're looking for so you click around, looking at the various options available to you at any given time, add a facet, remove an earlier one, many times before discovering that perfect result set. It shouldn't be limited to adding/removing facets in any prescribed order, including the order in which the user added them in the first place. With that in mind, having one facet in a search box at the top of the result screen, and a second and any others you add over on the right. This means you can never remove that first facet, which I found strange and overly limiting. It was also confusing - I had to look in two places to understand the scope of my current results.
I also saw some other things that looked like bugs - facets and values currently selected were still showing up in the narrow results box, clicking the red minus sign that looks like it will remove one facet removes them all, etc. I know from experience how hard this stuff can be to work out. What you've got so far is very clearly to me worth the effort. Kudos!
Jenn
========================
Jenn Riley
Metadata Librarian
Digital Library Program
Indiana University - Bloomington
Wells Library W501
(812) 856-5759
www.dlib.indiana.edu
Inquiring Librarian blog: www.inquiringlibrarian.blogspot.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Chris Barr
> Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 4:18 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] Catalog Browse Interface
>
> Hello Group,
>
> I am part of the development team for VuFind (http://www.vufind.org),
> an
> open source catalog search software. Today we released version 0.7 of
> the software (still beta, but we're getting there). With this release
> we
> included an experimental browse feature that we would love to hear some
> feedback on from this list, as the topic of browse has come up here in
> the past.
>
> Try the browse demo here: http://www.vufind.org/demo/Browse/Home
>
> This is still a work in progress. Some things in the browse are still
> buggy (Subject Area & Tags don't work yet). Hopefully you can overlook
> this and discuss, beyond the technical part, theoretically how you see
> a
> browse functioning and if this is going in the right direction or
> not...
> What can we do differently, beyond squashing the bugs, to make the
> browse useful for an average user?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Chris Barr
> Design & Interface Specialist
> Falvey Memorial Library
> Villanova University
Received on Thu Dec 13 2007 - 08:38:25 EST