The Dewey team hosted the Dewey Breakfast/Update yesterday morning at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans. This is a report on the first presentation: "The Evolution of Dewey & WebDewey: The Future is Now," by Andrea Kappler (Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library).
Five years ago, Andrea presented "The Evolution of Dewey: WebDewey from a User’s Perspective" during the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA 2001 Annual Conference in San Francisco. At yesterday’s breakfast, Andrea revisited her 2001 “wish list” for enhancements. As it turns out, seven out of her eight wishes for enhancements have been added to WebDewey since 2001: search history button, ability to revise Boolean searches, links to OPACs, work area for number building, flashing timer, local notes, and more built numbers. She also noted more “cool stuff I wish I wished for”: logon saved in a cookie, links to other resources on the opening screen, quick tips, keyboard shortcuts, the ability to launch WebDewey from Connexion Client, collapsible hierarchies and other user preferences, and improved mappings to other terminologies. Andrea wrapped up her talk with a new 2006 wish list: more frequent updating, links to the Dewey blog (including links back and forth between DDC numbers in WebDewey and discussions in the blog), better integration of local notes, import/export of user notes into Microsoft Word or Excel, links from Relative Index terms to the Relative Index, addition of Dewey numbers to LCSH authority records, and support for direct user feedback. Andrea’s ideas for the last include user-contributed built numbers, user-contributed terminology, and a direct line to EPC members. Of course, she's also waiting for her eighth wish from 2001—links back to discontinued numbers in older editions.
Breakfast participants added a few additional ideas to Andrea’s 2006 WebDewey wish list—assurance that user notes will persist when a new edition of Dewey is published, an interactive world map with Dewey area numbers, number-building assistance, and tools to track and verify each step in number building (on this last one, see the recent tip by Juli Beall describing her techniques for doing this in the current WebDewey interface). There was also a suggestion to add more entries for US cities in the Relative Index to help with classifying genealogical materials.
Guess we’ll have to invite Andrea back in 2011 for another five-year check on our progress!
Your site is great
Posted by: prudence | 05 July 2006 at 06:42 PM