I think planning for usability should be part and parcel of building the collection, and I don't think the Universal Digital Library ranks very high on usability. Text of books is not searchable. Default search is words in the title. "Advanced search" allows subject searching, but the 30+ subject categories you can use are so broad and general that they are not particularly useful in searching a collection of 1.5 million texts.
Access seems to be pretty much limited to known-item title searches.
Bernie Sloan
"Stephens, Owen" <o.stephens_at_IMPERIAL.AC.UK> wrote:
>
> It's difficult to imagine this working with the Universal
> Library. That resource has such primitive searching
> capabilities...almost as if building the collection was top
> priority, without much thought given to how to access what's
> in the collection.
>
Ummm... not wanting to be overly picky here - but surely building the
collection has to take priority over access?
I can't help but think that we could be a bit more constructive as a
community here (unless the above comment is intended to be facetious,
in which case apologies for being overly sensitive?). What are we doing
to make the texts in the Universal Library findable? Also, not that
certainly to some extent it is searchable via Google - making it more
accessible to most of the general population than any traditional
library catalogue - even given caveats about the limitations of this
type of retrieval.
If the above seems slightly bad tempered given the time of year, put it
down to me needing a holiday :)
Owen
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Received on Tue Dec 18 2007 - 08:54:55 EST