It's the huddle at the end of first and ten, 2nd quarter - here's the conversation going on inside the huddle....
"look what i found at arlington heights memorial library! they're pulling the librarything tag clouds across into their item record......they're also displaying similar books titles too. what's really cool is when you click on a book title, you stay within the library's catalog, you're not being returned to librarything. same for clicking on a tag cloud word - you click on the word and you get related book titles, click on the title and you stay inside the catalog!"
"wow - nice stuff! it also compresses all the different title records for the same title into one entry and also provides additional formats under its "related editions" heading"
"what if we could add the patron discussion comments on this same screen, wouldn't that make it a more full-bodied?"
back to the line, time for the play - research some more about how arlington is doing this, hut hut
send librarything some sample records so we can play with this concept some more, hut hut
and let's continue to make forward progress, even if its in 10 yard increments!
happy friday to all and to all a good weekend. may you enjoy the waning days of summer.
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3 comments:
Cool to see it in action, Cynthia. Actually the example you give a link to is the bibliographic record, not the item record.
When we saw the demo for Encore, the tag cloud kind of hovered (as clouds do!)to the side of the bib record if I recall correctly. I liked that a lot. It was much cleaner looking and more noticeable.
As important as bib records are for providing info that patrons pull out when doing various searches, patrons don't tend to stop and read a bib record per se. I'm thinking the tag cloud isn't as noticeable when it looks just like part of the bibliographic record.
Tagging has potential, but I still feel it can be more confusing than helpful to many patrons.
Case in point is my search for Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The largest tag words are Autism and Mystery which provide mainly non-fiction books about autism or a lot of mysteries (a huge, overwhelming list that will continue to grow as books are added that use the tag word Mystery). You could spend an hour going back and forth between the tags and the linked books trying to find something that meets your search needs.
I'm not sure where they got the "Similar Books" list from, but they list two other books by Haddon (I didn't need that help, thank you), a non-fiction titles about autism, a biography and one other fiction title. Not a great list in my opinion.
I noticed that there was a subject heading "Autism - Fiction." That's old school, I know, but it did give a list of fiction books that related to autism, if that is what I was looking for. Not surprisingly, that subject list didn't include a mystery/suspense book about an autistic child that was listed on the "Autism" tag list... why? Because the LCSH was "Autistic children -- Fiction", not "Autism - Fiction." AHHHH! Now I'm frustated and I do this for a living.
What to do? Personally I'd swing by Koelbel (or call, if I can still do that) and talk to JoAnne P and ask her for some suggestions.
The point here is that for this example, and in my cynical opinion, none of the choices worked as well as a "if you liked..." personal recommendation. My concern is that having patrons try to sift through pages of Tag words will become frustrating and drive people away. So, I'm for using caution before we jump on the Tagging bandwagon.
Perhaps patron/staff comments, or the evolution of a way to create a growing patron/staff "if you liked" wiki-style list would be a better method to help patrons find related book titles.
I suggest we put some money aside to create a "Virtual JoAnne" (does anyone remember Max Headroom?) for online reader's advisory!
Great idea, Andrew, a "virtual JoAnne"!
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