On 11/12/12 6:22 AM, Dan Matei wrote:
> Well, I have the impression that you tend to forget that we have also
> users who do not have a focused interest. The „museum visitor”
> mentality :-)
So let's leave the alphabet example. In the talk (which I also wrote up
[1]), I talked about focus - organizing the catalog not around THINGS
but as data and relationships. A small picture would help here, but this
is email. So imagine that your catalog has a number of different foci,
and the user can move between them. She can start in authors and see
related authors, subjects, time periods, genres. Or in subjects and see
related subjects, authors, time periods, etc. etc. Whatever info we have
can be made navigable. This is a start:
http://openlibrary.org/subjects/place:new_york
but I'd like to see it taken even further. I'd like to see more kinds of
links between things (including links between library resources and from
library catalog entries to web resources), I'd like to have our data
support good time and place-related searching, and I'd like to be able
to intermingle the library catalog with user activities -- to see what
books have been used in syllabi, what books get checked out together,
user reviews... and I would also like to see a revival of the art of
bibliography -- "5 books you should read on topic X" -- which today
would probably exhibit itself as a "recommender service."
As Dan has been saying (this is my interpretation) we can't expect that
users come to the library already knowing what they want, how it is
spelled, and what it relates to. Yet that is the user we serve today.
kc
[1] http://kcoyle.net/presentations/thinkDiff.pdf
> Saturday morning I entered the Art Museum in Copenhagen (I recommend
> !). Of course I had an idea of what I will find there (in contrast
> with the the Geological Museum across the street :-) But no idea if
> they have impressionists or surrealists ... in the collection ? So I
> was "exploring", i.e. browsing the gallery. Likewise, let's enter into
> a digital library, not with a specific interest, just out of
> curiosity: www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections. Let's see what
> they have... First "room": Greeks and Romans (your neighbours :-):
> www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman
> The alphabetic list is OK. Of course they could offer other ordering.
> But I wonder if they could find one which is indisputable better. Dan
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Mon Nov 12 2012 - 09:58:28 EST