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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