> I agree that showing the user evaluative resources that are not any good
> is not a service to the user. When there are no good evaluative
> resources available, we should not show bad ones to the user.

I think we actually agree on what should happen. We disagree on the
theory behind that :)

> [And in most library contexts I am familiar with, that is NOT accurately
> descirbed as "right over there". Perhaps you are familiar with other
> sorts of libraries then I. In a large urban public library system or
> just about ANY academic library, this is just as likely to be: "in the
> library, but you are sitting at home right now, which could be a mile
> away or could be two states away", "in another building [which may be
> miles away]", "checked out to a user, but you can recall it if you
> like", "in this building three floors and 200 meters away", or "not in
> our system at all right now but you can ILL it."

I hear you. This is very situation-dependent, but real. Not all books
are easy to hand. I am depressed by many libraries' willingness to
ship their books to holding facilities. While the rest of the
information world is getting easier, finding your own library's books
is often getting harder. Often these offloaded books are the ones you
can't find out about from any other source, so you're screwed both
physically and digitally.

That said, a lot of talk about the difficulty of getting a book seems
like whining. It's a teenager staring into the fridge and yelling
"Mom, is there anything to eat!" Colleges are places of serious
intellectual work. College work requires a lot of effort *after* you
get the resource. Difficult intellectual work isn't a bug, it's a
feature. It's why you go to college. Research itself often teaches
you. So expecting students to put up with some effort to get better
results is not, as the teenager would say, "the end of the world."

> I certainly agree that making it easier to find a book on the shelves is
> another enhancement we should be looking at. I think it was David Walker
> who had a nice OPAC feature that actually gave you a map, with hilighted
> path, from your computer terminal (if you were sitting in the library,
> which again is probably a _minority_ of our opac use), to the book on
> the shelves. That's awfully cool.

I completely agree. I know David Pattern did something like that. I've
been thinking about how to offer that sort of mapping as a commodity
service.

> But you started out, to my reading, suggesting that Table of Contents, reviews,
> and links to other editions could not possibly be useful, and I still take exception to that.

No. TOCs and reviews are usually pretty useful. Other editions are
useful if there's data there. And the most important cross-edition
link should be in your *catalog*, something almost no library does.

Best,
Tim