I think that one advantage of browsing a physical shelf is that the
shelf is linear, so it's very easy to methodically browse from the
left end of the shelf to the right, and have a sense that you haven't
accidentally missed anything.  (Ignore, for the moment, all the books
that happen to be checked out and not on the shelf...)

Online, linearity is no longer a constraint, which is a very good
thing, but it does have some drawbacks as well.  There is usually no
clear way to follow a series of "more like this" links and get a sense
that you have seen all the books that the library has on a given
subject.  Yes, you might get lucky and discover some great things, but
it usually involves a lot of aimless wandering, coming back to the
same highly-related items again and again, while missing some
slightly-more-distantly-related items.

Ideally, the user should be able to run a query, retrieve a set of
items, sort them however he wants (by author, date, call number, some
kind of dynamic clustering algorithm, whatever), and be able to
methodically browse from one end of that sort order to the other
without any fear of missing something.

Keith


On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 6:08 PM, Stephens, Owen
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think we need to understand the
> way people use browse to navigate resources if we are to successfully bring
> the concept of collection browsing to our navigation tools. David suggests
> that we should think of a shelf browse as a type of 'show me more like this'
> which is definitely one reason to browse - but is it the only reason?