Kids w/ no homework = mom with time to use kids as focus group ...... My kids are used to me using them as guinea pigs and are pretty good humored about it (having chocolate cake as a bribe doesn't hurt, either)..... Tonight was a homework-less night in our house, pretty rare. I pounced on the opportunity to test Encore and Aquabrowser with them. They were each (and separately) directed to Nashville's site for Encore and then to King County to experience their Aquabrowser.
Interestingly enuf, both preferred the Aquabrowser experience! They did not like the tag experience with Encore but really enjoyed the discover cloud look in Aquabrowser. The tag cloud in Nashville was "confusing" and they did not like the layout of the page either. It never occured to me that they might want to narrow a search by "fiction" and "nonfiction" which is a fairly natural way to want to search the catalog. We don't intuitively provide this to them, do we?
My head is brewing with a focus group test with patrons. One of the things we heard loud and clear was "give us the catalog" - both of these products give them the experience, but is one better than the other? It feels like Pepsi v Coke or Honda v Toyota...both are great products so it boils down to what your preferences are as to what you choose to buy.
Weigh in now, play "battle of the catalog enhancements" (boy does that sound clunky!) .... anyway, vote now!
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My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that Encore and Aquabrowser do two different things when it comes to tagging.
Encore lets users add their own 'subjects' to any bibliographic record. So they might add the tag "mountain bike" or "dirt" to a record whose subject is "all-terrain cycling".
Aquabrowser actually takes you off on a "discovery" adventure. Its tags have nothing to do with the subject at hand, but give the user the opportunity to go in search of something else unrelated to their original search. I can see this appealing to kids but I found it annoying on the sites I visited.
As for sorting fiction and non-fiction results, I think that's another issue that III's Scoping can take care of. David Britt would know!
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