Covers also vary across territories more than other bib details. From my personal experience of using covers in LibraryThing and Delicious Library I've found with my personal collection (heavy on the fantasy and sci-fi) in many cases this works against the advantages that Tim mentions (and which I mainly agree with).
For some reason the US fantasy/sci-fi covers seem to tend towards the hackneyed and clichéd more than their British counterparts - but maybe I'm biased :)
Hoping there are no cover artists on this list...
Owen
Owen Stephens
Assistant Director: e-Strategy and Information Resources
Imperial College London Library
Imperial College London
South Kensington
London SW7 2AZ
Tel: 020 7594 8829
Email: o.stephens_at_imperial.ac.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: 26 June 2008 15:46
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Fw: Zoomi and your library OPAC
The dynamism and look of the site is surely interesting, but it raises a key usability principle about covers and discovery. I learned this designing LibraryThing and I think it holds up in the OPAC, and should not be disregarded in the mad dash to covers:
Covers are not "better" than title / author lists, but different:
1. Covers are great for recognition, because visual memory is faster than reading.
2. Covers are terrible for discovery of new material, because reading covers, with all their different typefaces and layouts, is slower than reading a list.
The recognition/discovery dichotomy is key to LibraryThing. Users spend some of their time in known items (their books), and some in unknown items (tag lists, etc.). That is, covers are a great way to look at your own library, because you can recognize a cover you know without even reading it. The same applies to looking at someone else's library on LibraryThing-covers make it easy to quickly spot the books you share. But covers are a lousy way of showing people items they
*don't* know. A list of unknown books is much easier to deal with than a phalanx of unknown covers.
Tim
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Geoff Sinclair <geoffs_at_nipissingu.ca> wrote:
> I believe the Zoomii interface has a lot of potential. It works well
> for what it does because it represents a small bookstore collection.
> But I don't really see that scalability would be a problem for a
> larger collection if you beefed up the browsing options: more specific
> headings, tag clusters, user lists. And, for use as a library
> application, I'd like to see options for subject heading and LC classification browsing.
>
> Geoff
>
> --
> Geoff Sinclair
> Manager of Technical Services
> Education Centre Library, Nipissing University / Canadore College
> Tel: 705-474-3450 x4439
> E-mail: geoffs_at_nipissingu.ca
> Web: http://www.eclibrary.ca
>
>
>
> Steven Harris wrote:
>>
>> Regarding a virtual browse of the shelves: I'm not sure it will work
>> very well for a collection of, say, 2 million volumes. Maybe I'm
>> just too tied to text and books covers would work fine, but seems
>> like it would be unwieldy with very large collections.
>> --Steven Harris
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "Stephens, Owen" <o.stephens_at_IMPERIAL.AC.UK> 6/25/2008 2:12 am >>>
>>>>>
>>
>> Well, it's cute, but I'm not convinced this kind of 'real life'
>> analogy style interface works particularly well on computers. I
>> remember several years ago seeing a description of a 'virtual
>> desktop', that looked like a real desk, and where you had to 'go to
>> the post office' to send an email - what a pain, when you can just click send!
>>
>> I think experimentation should be encouraged and so it is really nice
>> to see this type of thing being tried, but I tried to use it and
>> found it incredibly clunky - it has impact, but I don't personally
>> believe it has staying power - personally I wouldn't use it instead of Amazon to browse.
>>
>> Owen
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> http://zoomii.com/
>>>>
>>
>>
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Thu Jun 26 2008 - 09:29:47 EDT