Friday, April 25, 2008

Keeping Alphabetical Browse in a Library Catalog


Alphabetical browsing offers a high degree of precision and has been a core organizing principle of human information over the last 4000 years. Should we also remove the A-Z journal list, our list of popular databases, our list of subject guides, and every other library tool that organizes itself alphabetically? Of course not. What's wrong with browsing among similar titles, among variant spellings of an author's name, or allowing users to choose between various subheadings attached to subject headings? I understand the alphabetical browse constituted a minority of the searches done in some libraries but the library offers any number of tools (RSS feeds, blogs, Facebook widgets) that require staff time to maintain but are used by a minority of users. If there are fewer searches being done with an alphabetical browse, maybe it is because people are finding what they want the first time. This functionality is critical where the Bible and other standard religious texts are represented by uniform titles and carefully structured subject headings.

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