Libraries should do browse, not search
From Eric Hellman of Openly:
I think that libraries should consider returning to their historic roots that have nothing to do with “search”.Forget search- a billion dollars says that Google and Amazon will do search way better than any real library on the planet, and libraries can now leverage these searching capabilities in very real ways.
What libraries CAN do with their “rich stores” of data is to facilitate browsing- which is what libraries have always done well. Please take a look at today’s very best digital library software package - iTunes. It’s modestly priced. It manages collections using xml and leverages large stores of remote metadata. There’s a small search box that you might not even notice because the collection is so accessible via browsing. That’s worth emulating.
sounds fantasitc. There’s been a lot of discussion since then about how to really implement such a system. The mSpace project from the University of Southampton might give us some idea of how such a system might work.