Tag clouds as an OPAC interface
You’ve seen them in del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, and other social-software environments… “tag clouds” have become a readily recognizable interface that allows for browsing while simultaneously giving an idea of popularity, quantity, or some other scale. The idea is to list a collection of keyterms (like tags) side by side with fairly close spacing, but to allow font size or weight to convey information about the number of citations that use that tag or cover that topic.
Well, the idea of using tag clouds in the library space has been discussed on some library blogs lately, by Jenny Levine at Shifted Librarian and by Ivan Chew at Rambling Librarian. But leave it to the endlessly talented David Pattern to take his jetlag buzz after flying back to the UK from Minneapolis and turn it into something amazing like this… a tag cloud of subject headings straight out of his Horizon database… and functioning as a front-end for subject browsing in his Horizon Information Portal OPAC! What a scrumptious prototype of a very tasty concept. Way to go David!
Many thanks Luke! I’ve uploaded the script for others to play around with:
http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/47/
Comment on 16 November 2005 @ 1205
[…] David Pattern’s jetlag-fueled creativity binge continued last week, even after coming up with the marvelous tag cloud browsing interface we discussed earlier. His encore? An Amazon/Netflix-style addition to the full bib in HIP that informed the user, “People who borrowed this, also borrowed…” and listed up to 10 other suggested bib records (see the bottom of this screenshot). Wow — how’d he do that? Well, he’s using the circ_tran table and his mighty Perl skills to create the recommendation lists on a periodic basis (it’s not a realtime thing yet). […]
Pingback on 20 November 2005 @ 1332
Man! Wished I knew how to do that. I couldn’t quite configure Tag Cloud to work the way I wanted it to…
Comment on 30 November 2005 @ 0737
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Trackback on 7 June 2009 @ 2106