Karen Coyle said: "...if your language has an alphabetical order (and not all do), then taking words/names and placing them in that order is helpful because users know the alphabet."
People may know the alphabet, but that doesn't necessarily mean they completely understand the concept of putting things in alphabetical order. I patronize several local video rental stores, and each of them has some real quirks when it comes to arranging the DVDs on shelves.
I'm not talking about maybe having a single DVD slightly out of alphabetical order. For example, the titles beginning with "Sa.." to "Sl..." might be in good order. Next come titles beginning with "Su.." to "Sw...". And then, seemingly from out of nowhere, come titles beginning "Sm..." to "St..."
This drives me crazy, as a librarian. But it doesn't seem to bother other customers. I've pointed this out to staff, but they sort of look at me like I'm some sort of harmless kook. :-)
I think this harkens back a bit to my "systems deveopled BY librarians FOR librarians" statement. Librarians know alphabetization a lot more precisely than the general public. Alphabetization can be a lot messier out there in the real world. We need to be careful when assuming that our library-world views on a given topic are reflected in the real-world views of our users.
Bernie Sloan
--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Karen Coyle <lists_at_KCOYLE.NET> wrote:
> From: Karen Coyle <lists_at_KCOYLE.NET>
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Browse functionality (was Whose elephant is it, anyway? (the OLE project))
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 12:05 PM
> Owen, yes, I think this is worth exploring. One of the
> bright lights of early librarianship (no time to dig it up,
> maybe later) talked about "known order," mainly
> referring, of course, to alphabetical order. Back to the
> phone book: if your language has an alphabetical order (and
> not all do), then taking words/names and placing them in
> that order is helpful because users know the alphabet. If
> instead you ordered the phone book by how tall people are,
> it wouldn't be very helpful because the order
> wouldn't match the user's knowledge. The other thing
> about this kind of search is that the user probably has to
> have a pretty good idea of what he's looking for -- a
> particular place in the known order, e.g. someone's last
> name. This is really a 'find' not a 'browse'
> in my mind. No one expects to go from a-z in the phone book,
> although they may wish to in a shorter list (your journal
> titles example). Funny, though, that we don't expect
> items on a restaurant menu to be in alphabetical order, yet
> we are usually able to find what we are looking for
> ("do they have a tuna sandwich"?). I think that
> *quantity* of entries is a big factor in terms of how much
> order is needed.
>
> It seems to be inherent in a thesaurus that the users are
> not expected to already know the order of the entries, but
> that the thesaurus actually guides the user. The user
> isn't doing a mere lookup, but is following a structure.
> The user possibly expects to be directed to other concepts
> from his entry term and the thesaurus must be able to guide
> the user from whatever starting point the user chooses. So
> if someone goes into the thesaurus with the term
> "sociology" the thesaurus will provide a
> conceptual context and some directions the user can go in.
> Thesauri tend to be hierarchical, but I think we could do
> ones that are not so using more relationships than just BT,
> NT, RT.
>
> Some folks have experimented with providing LC
> classification has a kind of subject browse. I don't
> know how useful that has turned out to be for users. It is
> multiple hierarchies and not perfectly hierarchical, but it
> has conceptual structure. But LCSH isn't LCC. The main
> thing is that LCSH is neither a 'known order' list
> (because users don't know the entry terms) nor is it a
> thesaurus, because it has so little conceptual structure. So
> trying this thought experiment with LCSH in mind gets one
> pretty twisted.
>
> kc
>
Received on Mon Mar 16 2009 - 16:19:50 EDT