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By Tom Groenfeldt
Go to the public library site for Queens and type in a term like "art photography." Up pops a list of titles such as "Photography, a Middle Brow Art," and "Photography, the Art of Composition." But on the left side of the page appears an explosion of related topics, which can quickly take you to bird photography, art, street photography, painters and photography, or the history of photography. Click on a subject and it moves to the center, where it is quickly surrounded on the screen by a new batch of topics.
The Web-based tool, from a Dutch company called AquaBrowser, is being used by 2,000 library locations worldwide with 60 million patrons, from community libraries like Sussex County in New Jersey to university and research libraries.
Denver Public Library users, for example, can try AquaBrowser by clicking on the "preview new catalog" link. A search there for "art photography" brings up books and photographs in the library's collection, including boxes of work by Laura Gilpin -- a famous landscape photographer -- and photographs of local families. But the search also returns the MLA (Modern Language Association) handbook.
Machine-generated results can be especially confusing in fiction searches, according to a librarian who has evaluated AquaBrowser. PD James brings up all the wrong kinds of Jameses in the tag cloud -- Earl, King, KJ Bible, etc. These are machine-generated "associations" of the term James. The right-hand panel also gives stray references to jazz, which is a different James altogether. But just as Google requires the user to refine and ignore what the software drags in, so does this.
AquaBrowser sits on top of a libraries' existing electronic catalog. Joanne King, associate director of communications at Queens Library, said that advanced users like the word-cloud feature but most don't pay any attention to it.
"There is still a percentage of the population who are resistant to online catalogs as a concept and are still mourning for the card catalog," said King. "But there has been no resistance to AquaBrowser itself." Although AquaBrowser offers the potential for user tagging and creation of personal book list recommendations, Queens is keeping it simple for now.
"Our Web site and our catalog are undergoing a radical overhaul," explained King. "For the moment, though, we don't offer the capability for bookclubs, tagging or creating lists."
Rush Miller, Hillman University Librarian at the University of Pittsburgh, said that three qualities set AquaBrowser apart. "First, its unparalleled ability to act as a true discovery tool, exposing users via the word cloud and facets to items they didn't even know they wanted or knew we had," noted Miller on a testimonial on AquaBrowser's Web site. "Second, AquaBrowser's ability to elegantly bring together local and remote, print and electronic, and to present them all in an interface that is simple and usable yet extremely powerful. Finally, we are extremely impressed with AquaBrowser's extensible and flexible platform and are looking at integrating many resources and services in AquaBrowser."
In rural New Jersey, the Sussex County Library has just launched AquaBrowser. "We liked the interface, the way it used the search patterns, how it used information and the links you could have," said Stan Pollakoff, the library's director. "Everyone likes it and it works flawlessly with what we have."
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