One of the reasons I read a lot of Library blogs is not because that's where the cutting edge of disseminating information is*, but because they occasionally report about nifty catalogue interfaces...
[* IMHO ;-) many libraries appear to fight against adopting standards and strategies the real world uses, because they are, perhaps, a bit ropey in terms of classification and metadata compared to what information professionals are used to, or at least, compared to what they expect to use...]
The OU has several catalogues, of course, of which perhaps the most important in 'sales' terms is the OU course catalogue.
I have in the past tried tinkering with very unofficial not quite extensions to this service, such as the OUseful course search (which I still need to provide a search interface form for, although I have exposed a SOAP web service interface to it), the OUseful Course Book Search (which allows you to search for books associated with OU courses) or an easy to remember redirect to the course choice pages).
However, one thing I haven't looked at is a live search in which the results are displayed as you type (for example, try out the live search this blog).
Live search would be a cool toy, if nothing else, if applied to the OU catalogue, or indeed the OU Voyager library catalogue (and I guess, my OUseful search tools...).
Here's an example of what a bibliographic database live search interface might look like, for eample (look for the link to the movie).
Live search is interesting to me in part because:
1) it's predictive;
2) you get a feel, as you type, for whether your search is going where you want it to;
3) before the predictive element starts to work properly, there is the possibility of a serendipitous find on the way to the actual target of your search.
If the OU is to open up some of it's content (and I hope to post more on this in the next week or two) then helping people find and reuse it (as well as remixing it) will become increasingly important.
Cross-linking course books and ROUTES resources with course codes will also allow for a much expanded search engine, which will cast a wider net of search terms over the courses we offer. By which I mean, if your search hits on a book that is used in a particular course, for example, then you can return the course as an associated, or related link.
PS Searching legacy content/teaching materials internally is also an issue that doesn't appear to have been addressed yet, although the much heralded new ECM system may offer this facility...
I dream of the day when we let Google Print scan all our legacy content/materials from expired courses, so that internally at least we can use it as a teaching material encycolpedia, and perhaps even get to reuse the some of the content (I suspect one of the reasons we don't reuse content much is because we can't find it/don't know it exists...). It would be nice if the old content was wikified, too, so that we could start to use it as living material and perhaps get a community co-revising, or co-maintaining (rather than strictly co-creating) the materials, but I suspect that's too much to wish for...
Posted by ajh59 at September 10, 2005 09:40 PM