Zoomi has provoked the most interesting discussion on this
list in some time. About six hours after I first used Zoomi,
I realized why the UI seemed so familiar: it's basically
Google Earth applied to a book collection. From that perspective,
I see no reason why Zoomi couldn't scale to huge collections,
especially if beefed up with improved searching, faceting, etc.
However, like many others, I'm conflicted over the value of cover
art in this sort of application. For a book store or a small
public library with a rapidly changing collection of recent
materials, cover art seems a natural. But, for a large academic
library, with a collection that goes back hundreds of years,
available cover art represents a fraction of the materials in
the collection. For these materials, one seems limited to
scanning title pages as substitutes for cover art, which is
what Google Books is doing. Google can link their cover art
to the books they scan, but even if the GB cover art and
scanned title pages were available without restriction, how
do we link reliably to them when universal identifiers do not
exist for pre-1960's books. Not to mention the vast quantities
of unpublished materials that many libraries hold.
Selden Deemer, Library Systems Administrator
Emory University Libraries
Atlanta, Georgia
EMAIL: libssd_at_emory.edu
PHONE: 404-727-0271
FAX: 404-727-0827
Received on Fri Jun 27 2008 - 05:58:38 EDT