Comments on: The catalogue of the future? http://www.librarybazaar.com/2009/09/17/the-catalogue-of-the-future/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:51:17 -0500 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Amazon Windowshop: Serendipitous Browsing Online « Bibliographic Wilderness http://www.librarybazaar.com/2009/09/17/the-catalogue-of-the-future/#comment-8967 Amazon Windowshop: Serendipitous Browsing Online « Bibliographic Wilderness Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:06:33 +0000 http://www.librarybazaar.com/2009/09/17/the-catalogue-of-the-future/#comment-8967 [...] 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: [...] [...] 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: [...]

]]> By: Jonathan Rochkind http://www.librarybazaar.com/2009/09/17/the-catalogue-of-the-future/#comment-8966 Jonathan Rochkind Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:02:26 +0000 http://www.librarybazaar.com/2009/09/17/the-catalogue-of-the-future/#comment-8966 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). 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).

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