Peter Morville has a brief review of the new online catalog at NCSU. It uses software from Endeca, a systems vendor that has clients like Barnes and Noble as its customers.
There are some very nice parts of it that would be worth a look. You can browse the collection by subject area, getting a shelf list at any point of what the stacks look like. When you do a search you can optionally sort the results by the popularity of the book (the number of checkouts), so that it's easy to find the titles that circulate a lot. That sounds like a tremendous help when it comes to locating one good book inside an unfamiliar topic - use the scent trail from a bunch of other patrons to zero in on a title that gets a lot of use. There are lots of ways to search sideways in the catalog, and it gives you instant feedback as to how many titles will be returned for any of those clickthroughs.
Nicely done. Read the NCSU Library news release for their take on it. (Alas, no comments in the news release area, or I would have told them directly there.)
Technorati Tags: endeca, elginpelican
Comments