Sean Aery and I presented on Saturday, October 18 at the LITA National Forum on our homemade “Tripod” platform for digital collections. Here’s an embed of our Google slides:
We proposed this presentation back in February. The original title, “A Faceted Browsing Approach to Duke’s Digital Collections,” stuck, but by October 18, we had maybe one reference to facets in the presentation. I’m not sure what we should have called it. Something about the “three ‘bilities” might have been good, but that slide (#21) didn’t exist until October 16.
Thanks for posting, Will. Here’s some followup information for anyone interested:
Full presentation available at…
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddpbx8xn_128dgt6stct
While it’s true that faceted browsing wasn’t ultimately the focus of the presentation and the slides, we touched on it in several places in our session. Here were the key points about our facets:
— Forcing precoordination of search terms (like the traditional search > get results > evaluate > issue new search paradigm) often leads to No Results Found pages when a user’s mental model or expectations don’t match a system’s actual representation. Facets enable a user to refine a search iteratively rather than making them start over from scratch to get a new set of results. They also aid discovery by making the system representation more transparent.
— Like many faceted browsing interfaces, ours allows you to remove facet selections (by clicking the X) regardless of the order in which they were made.
— Collection facet choices use 30×30 icons to represent each collection. This was one of our tactics in maintaining the unique brand of each individual collection while presenting them in a common integrated interface.
— Facets available for narrowing change depending on each collection’s metadata schema. This is probably the most innovative and unique aspect of our system. When searching across multiple collections, facets are Collection, Type, Subject, and Year. When searching or browsing in the context of a single collection, the facets change to reflect the unique metadata fields in that collection. See these examples…
Search for keyword ‘car’…..
Search in all collections
Facets are collection, type, subject, year.
Narrow results by the following collection examples to see how the faceted navigation changes….
Ad*Access collection
(available facets include company & product)
American Song Sheets collection
(available facets include illustration and terms)
Historic American Sheet Music
(available facets include illustration type, instrumentation)
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs
(available facets include tag/term, place, country)
I’ll plan on posting more about facets in a future post!
There is a thorough summary of this presentation written by Julie Shedd, Web Services Specialist at Mississippi State Libraries: http://blogs.library.msstate.edu/web2summit/?p=118
Thanks, Julie!
Thank you, Jill!
We at MSU have been admiring Duke’s digital collections for quite a while. 🙂