The catalogue of the future?

Imagine if your catalogue looked like Amazon Windowshop. Would this make you happy? Would it make browsing easier for your users?

We’ve taken out the text and created an immersive experience to help you lose yourself in exploration. Trailers for bestselling movies. Insight into the hottest TV shows and video games. Track samples from Tuesday’s new music releases. Audio reviews of books you should read. Amazon Windowshop lets you get a taste of many titles. They’re here - in one place - and all you have to do is move a few keys to zoom in on whatever flips your switch.

September 17, 2009 · Filed Under Cataloguing, Future, Librarians, OPAC

Comments

2 Responses to “The catalogue of the future?”

  1. Jonathan Rochkind on September 18th, 2009 1:02 pm

    I wouldn’t want the WHOLE library catalog to look ONLY like that — but I think it could be VERY useful and interesting to provide a “serendipitous browsing” interface to the catalog (on top of a more traditional type-in-search-get-result list interface) that is along the lines of Amazon windowshop.

    Try to replicate the experience of browsing the shelves, but online you get the benefit that you can arrange books in more than one dimension (as amazon windowshop does in two), re-arrange them in different orders (for instance LCC OR DDC OR something else entirely, don’t have to pick just one), and additionally be able to allow unified browsing of a corpus that may be in several different physical locations (including off-site storage).

  2. Amazon Windowshop: Serendipitous Browsing Online « Bibliographic Wilderness on September 18th, 2009 1:06 pm

    […] Serendipitous Browsing Online September 18, 2009 Posted by jrochkind in General. trackback Fiacre O’Duinn alerts us to a kind of interesting interface Amazon provides, which I hadn’t been aware of before: […]

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