Iman Moradi is talking about how we organise library stock and spaces – he’s going through at quite a pace, so very brief notes again.
Finding things is complex
It’s a cliched that library users often remember the colour of the book more than the title – but why don’t we respond to this? Organise books by colour – example from Huddersfield town library.
Iman did a demonstrator – building a ‘quotes’ base for a book – use a pen scanner to scan chunk of text from book, and associate with book via ISBN – starts to build a set of quotes from the book that people found ‘of interest’
Think about libraries in terms of games – users are ‘players’, the library is the ‘game environment’. Using libraries is like a game:
- Activities = Finding, discovery, collection
- Points/levels = acquiring knowledge
It may be a cliche that library users remember the colour of a book jacket, but in my experience as a library practitioner they’re almost always wrong for some reason. So you may be creating a red herring that actually presents a barrier between the user and that item by putting in some kind of retrieval facility based on colour.
It’s probably worth noting that Bowker are now creating metadata for book covers (e.g. keywords that describe the elements of the book cover). So, you’d be able to find book covers that had someone holding an apple in their hand.
Sarah — could you elaborate on your “almost always wrong” statement? Wrong in what way? I can’t see it being a worse barrier than some of the hurdles we normally place in the way — e.g. inability to find “Oranges are not the only fruit” on most OPACs thanks to our insistence that Boolean is good thing! 😉