The boffins in OCLC’s Office of Research have done it again. Just one look at the new DeweyBrowser -- launched today on the ResearchWorks site -- should convince you that these people truly are the Special Ones. It’s a visual interface that you can use to access any collection of resources that have been assigned DDC numbers. You start things off by typing in a search term in the normal way, but the system then responds, not with a conventional list of results, but with a color-coded display of the ten main DDC classes. “Hot” colors show you where lots of records that match your search are classed. You pick the main class that you want to take a closer look at -- say, 7 Arts & recreation -- and the ten divisions of that class are displayed with the same kind of color coding. Click on the division of your choice -- e.g., 77 Photography & computer art -- and the ten sections of that division are displayed, again color-coded so that you can see at a glance exactly where relevant records are concentrated. In this way, you can browse up and down the top three levels of the DDC hierarchy, using the colors as a guide, before settling on a particular DDC section -- e.g., 775 Digital photography -- and scanning a list of the records in that section that match your search term. In the demo version of DeweyBrowser that’s currently available at the ResearchWorks site, the collection is a catalog of more than 125,000 electronic books. Access to other collections is planned, but meanwhile we want to hear from you! Bouquets or brickbats? Either way, keep ’em coming.
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