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Month: May 2006

The Catalog, The User Experience, and Discovery

Published by Iris on Saturday, May 20th, 2006

I’m still working to figure out what the future of the catalog looks like (in preparation for a short presentation in 10 days), and I’m beginning to realize that I’m doing this at precisely the best time. Nothing’s really been figured out already, so there’s still room for imagination. And yet, it’s becoming a major topic of discussion, so people can learn from each other’s imagination and leapfrog to new possibilities.

I’m particularly interested in a couple of themes that keep cropping up.

  • Allowing user commenting and tagging (the Hennepin County Library’s already doing this – via Library Stuff and TTW).
  • Separating the inventory mechanisms from the end user searching mechanisms.
  • Giving users choices rather than deciding for them what display options are best for them, or what delivery options will fit their needs.
  • Integrating information discovery into the user’s workflow (like Amazon is, via Dempsey).
  • Creating visual representations (such as tag, Dewey, or subject clouds like this one).
  • Leveraging metadata from multiple sources to improve services (metadata from Amazon, WorldCat, and in an academic environment things like class enrollment or year in school might also be useful).
  • Using RSS and other Web 2.0 features to push information out to the user’s environment (such as classes, clubs, etc)

Lorcan Dempsey has a rich set of posts on these and related issues. If you start here he leads you to related posts.

There are some more extreme ideas that may or may not come to fruition (such as eliminating LCSH or eliminating subject classification, as Calhoun mentions as an option and many, many people have critiqued).

There’s also the related issue of what happens when we scan all the books, as Google’s trying to do. There’s been a lot of talk of the NTY Magazine article called “Scan This Book” (Sunday, May 14th, 2006). The Gypsy Librarian, the O’Reilly Radar, and the Library Garden have all written very interesting responses to that article. What would discovery look like if this vision of the future came true? I don’t have answers…just questions.

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Categories? Tag Clouds? So Many Decisions. (Plus an unrelated note)

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 18th, 2006

I’d just reconciled myself to the idea of not having categories in my blog (because I use Blogger). I’d told myself, “It’s ok. Actually, the tag cloud is better. It’s cooler, more spontaneous, cooler, oh yeah, and cooler. Categories are for old folks.” (I’m very good at rationalizations.) Well, now I find out (via this amazing blog I just found) that there’s a hack that could let me have categories to my heart’s content (you can find it here).

But here’s the thing… My sidebar is pretty full. I keep tweaking it, and moving more of my blogroll to the folders in my bloglines account that don’t get displayed on my sidebar, etc., but I can’t think of a good way to make more space. So now I’m wondering, to category or not to category…that is the question. Would this be more useful than my tag cloud? Does any one have a preference? Do I do both? Oh, the decisions!

On a completely unrelated note, I think Stephen did end up “scratching some assumptions” on Monday, and the future is showing through (see his response to my post). Thanks Stephen! And, as I said in the comments there, I didn’t mind a bit that the talk went long. Great talk.

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