Stephens, Owen schrieb:
>
> Just to understand what you are looking for in terms of Browse. The NLA implementation of VuFind has what I would regard as a Browse function - you can Browse the following:
>
> Names at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Browse/Names?browse=names&from=
> Subjects at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Browse/Subjects?browse=subjects&from=
> Callnumbers at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Browse/Subjects?browse=subjects&from=
> Series at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Browse/Series?browse=series&from=
>
> Is this browsing as you mean it? If not, what would you require additionally?
>
Yes indeed! I'd say make the space narrower between the lines so you see
more of it at once, but the way it works is just what I mean.
> (also you question the scalability - what scale are you thinking of?
How it is affected by the physical growth of the data. Does it get
slower with every million data, and how much?
How long is it to create the index? Is real-time updating possible?
Or overnight only? How many hours per million records for a complete
re-index? Does this time grow linearly or exponentially?
This discussion has showed again that the term "browsing" is not
well enough understood or defined. Therefore, I said "index browsing"
all the time and "browsable index", to distinguish it from browsing
a list of records. The latter is always a subset and it is always
the result of a guess really. Or two: the user first guesses what
terms might be the best to use, then the machine makes some sort of a
"guess", but in a much different way, what records might match the
query. The machine's guess is opaque, but the user takes it at face
value and then browses this list, not seeing anything that has narrowly
escaped the machine's guess, and the larger the set is, the less likely
will they make another attempt or think about the appropriateness of
their initial guess. This whole business is, I think, not well enough
understood. Who, if not our profession, should understand it in a
thorough way, and wouldn't that require a clear agreement about the
terms we use?
B.Eversberg
Received on Thu Mar 12 2009 - 10:48:31 EDT