More stupid OPAC tricks
Boy, the more I learn about OPACs the more I hate them. I wish I could hire a posse of usability experts and sic ’em onto the nearest OPAC. These things have all the design sense of the architects who built the UW Humanities building.
We were talking about collocation, browsing, and subject search yesterday in cataloguing class, with particular reference to how electronic access changes how people find things in libraries. The teacher pointed out that it is in fact possible to get an idea of what’s on a particular shelf in the library remotely, through the OPAC. “MadCat has a Call Number Browse for that,” she said.
Oh. That’s what that’s for. Right, okay, gotcha. Never understood that before. That’s kinda cute, really.
Except—what an ungodly stupid place to put it! Never mind that the phrase “Call Number Browse” is so jargonny and weird that even proto-librarian me didn’t see any use for it until I got whacked in the face with it. (I mean, the average patron is barely aware that call numbers mean something. So we’re going to ask them to show up at the initial search screen with a call number in mind? As if.)
The real problem is that this capability simply does not belong in the initial search screen! What do you do when you browse in service of a research goal? Go to any random shelf? No, of course not. You find a shelf you’re interested in first (often through a known-item book search), then you browse. I mean, duh; this pattern of behavior doesn’t take Ph.D researchers to figure out.
So to do something analogous, the OPAC should offer the browse functionality not in the initial search screen, but on the bibliographic-record display page, so that someone who’s found a hot prospect can check for others. Nor it shouldn’t be called “call number browse,” either—it should be some variant on “nearby books” or “on the shelf with this book…” or just simply “more like this.”
A really smart OPAC, when this link is clicked, will show a list of titles with some visual indicator for which are in-library and which aren’t (greying-out the checked-out titles would do, I’m sure). This puts the OPAC a leg up on the physical shelves, even—there’s no way to know from looking at a shelf that a physical book exists if it’s been checked out.
Voila. We’ve decluttered the initial search screen slightly (always a good thing!), we’ve de-jargonned one of our services, and we’ve brought shelf-browsing back to the digital library. Why the hell has this not been done? Who designs OPACs, anyway? Orangutans could do a better job of it, I swear.