The newspaper had an interesting article last week about ask.com and how its redesigned their website. To me (and since this is a blog i guess i'm free to offer my opinion) it looks more federated-search like, returning your results in the center column with information on the left column if you want to narrow or expand your search and then more information presented on the right side to send your search in another direction.
My brain looked at this and thought about capturing the same notion for our website/catalog. Picture this: you come to our site and enter your search term. No need to choose catalog or web or other........ Your results from the catalog are in the middle of the page. Off to the left you narrow your search with the catalog terms. To the right there's information pulled from the website that's related and another area/box shows you the titles of articles from the databases. To access them, you then authenticate. It's one-stop-searching!
For those of you who look to other library websites to see what they're doing and how, Hennepin follows this kind of model in the way they present the information.
Do you like it? Does this make any sense from a patron-point-of-view?
3 comments:
maybe this is un-blog-like to comment to your own post but i forgot to mention that ask.com lets you choose your own "skin" much like the westerville teen site does. something new - is this a feature y'all find engaging?
The Hennepin concept is interesting because it can expose patrons to the other kinds of information available - websites, books, programs, databases. And that's our job isn't it?
The drawback is what kind of data is retrieved. When I type in "Travel" on the Hennepin site, it returns an interesting mix of resources - some that relate to my idea of the search, others that do not. But that's pretty broad - a more realistic entry is "Italy Travel" - however, this only lists catalog items (the first of which is a music CD by the Greencards - not sure why), and a few library website entries, but no database and no web sites!!!! - yet typing that entry in Google returns 112 million results. Unless a website service gives good, meaningful results, patrons will give up on it quickly and just use Google.
As for skins, my kids like to customize their pages (such as igoogle), but I don't seem to have the time to do that, although it seems like fun. Just adding a background doesn't seem like much customization.
When I searched for one of my new favorite authors Joe Meno, it only brought up results in the catalog, no web results, same with the title of his newest book (The Boy Detective Fails), so obviously in that instance, the other searches are useless to me. Now when I only type in "boy detective" it brings up results from the library's page...comments on Encyclopedia Brown. Not exactly what I was looking for, but in a future search I might be very interested in reading those comments in the search results.
I really like having results default to our online catalog, and having other search results from the web/website available as a side thing like you said is nice. I am a big google fan and have been accustomed to optional search results being just a click away, like images. To me it's like those other results are just hiding right behind my web results. But then again, if they aren't in view right away, I may never have a reason to click over to the other options. With the comments coming up in the search, I am drawn to click to see what other patrons have to say, and may be inclined to leave my own comments.
I like having customizable skins, but do I not get something...on ask.com you click on your skin, it changes the background. Then I type my search, hit enter and I'm taken to a results page that is a white page right? So it took me longer to change the skin than I would actually be on the page to see the skin? And since you have to change it everytime you go back, I definitely wouldn't do it since I'm not on the page long enough to get any kind of enjoyment out of it. With the westerville site you would definitely be spending enough time on the page to make it worth your while to change it up. I think it's very cool. For a page I may be spending a lot of time at, customization would be a great option and I would use it. The more I can do, the better.
OK remember I have not spent a lot of time on our website or doing much really except with the catalog, so I am still new at this!
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