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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?