March 03 2008
For the past couple of months, I've been looking into how you find items that you didn't know you wanted until you've seen them. Serendipitous finds or random browsing, if you will. This is a natural activity in a library, but methods need to be developed to expose the dark corners of a digital repository. Adopting some Web 2.0 sugar, I'm now working on publishing keywords from content in the repository as tag clouds so that at the bottom of the search page, people can get a feel for what are the most common (the most recent, the most popular, the most searched for) keywords in the repository.
The conference in Edinburgh helped a great deal. I've picked up snippets of code from Martin Morrey and Paul Hart that will help with trawling the repository using what's called OAI harvesting. The other comment that reverberated at the conference is making things easy to use. "Make it like Google or Amazon" is the challenge, nothing terribly new, just making the user experience better, more enjoyable. If I can make the repository a popular resource, I feel I'll have made some progress towards that goal.
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