On Fri, 27 May 2005, Mike Rylander wrote:

> We have something similar in the "Relevant Subjects" sidebar of our
> pre-alpha OPAC (http://gapines.org), though the user only gets to
> select one subject to resubmit the search with in ours.

That's nifty.  Voyager does the relevant subjects at the record level but
not at the subject level, which would be an improvement.

> I personally
> find that kind of interface pretty addictive.  I love to bounce around
> in the subjects to see what unexpected linkages there are hiding the
> the database.

I've been finding that it also seems to be good in turning up cataloging
errors.  You're not likely to find "eat Britain" by the usual subject
search methods (not near "Great Britain" alphabetically), but I found such
an entry in our catalog with my tool.

> I think the general idea is sound.  The only problem I see, and it's
> quite subjective (ugh... :)), is that it's hard to tell if you're
> finding anything interesting based on the new search.  Perhaps list
> the top two or three titles based on rank for each subject heading?

I was thinking a title list would be helpful (since you get a group of
titles you'd only get by a very complex boolean search).  The trick is to
make it manageable rather than overwhelming.

Cheers,
Chris