On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Naomi Dushay <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 1.  The user is not broken. Our faculty are very vocal in desiring a
> "virtual shelf list" that will allow them to, given a specific item, look
> for "closely located" items.  Call numbers have facilitated co-location of
> (some) related physical materials, which facilitates a browsing experience
> that users enjoy.  Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's something else ... but
> they enjoy it and find it useful. They are used to call numbers, and by god,
> they want call numbers.   Who are we to naysay?

I don't mean to naysay -- I just suspect that what what people think
of when shelf browsing -- namely, the big set of books arranged in LC
order -- may not be the part of the experience that makes shelf
browsing so special.

I like browsing stacks; there's some kind of Special Sauce in that
process I've never experienced online, though I've seen a few
stack-browse-like interfaces. Google Books comes closest even though
it's not a stack browser, which suggests to me that perhaps that
magical stack browse flavor is actually a smack of content.

However! This can perhaps be tested in a rather straightforward way
without solving the Somewhat Hard Problem of efficiently ordering
millions of bib records and creating an interface to navigate The
Whole World Of Materials.

I imagine one cold start small -- the experience should certainly
scale *down*. You could sorting a small(!) set of books (100? 1,000?)
and do some targeted testing of searching for books on a topic
contained within.

Then you could test the experience of online stack browsing with users
-- without needing to build a big scalable database and answer big
questions about different call number schemas and media types and
clean up lots of borked catalog records.

$0.02 from someone who's not building one ;-)

Cheers,
-Nate