A few months ago a colleague brought the Dewey cloud created by Steve Thomas to our attention. Steve used the Dewey Summaries to provide a visual presentation of the print collection of the University of Adelaide Library. In OCLC Research, we have also been experimenting with tag clouds. We recently generated Dewey clouds in English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese for the top 100 Dewey classes in the WorldCat collection searchable through the DeweyBrowser. We also added some new features to the DeweyBrowser including a library shelf view and the ability to sort the title list. Please let us know what you think of these DeweyBrowser changes.
I find this very intriguing. At a glance, you can see where a library's collection is strong (or simply heavy) in some areas, light in others.
Of course, this is not the be-all and end-all of the process; the clouding process only gives you a set of indicators that can be used as a tool for further examination of the catalogue. For instance, you may only have 4 or 5 volumes/items in a given area, but they may be the best works on the subject. Clouding gives a quick visual sense of the raw numbers of a collection, but not of the comparative or overall quality. That is left as an exercise for the collection development department.
Posted by: Bruce Klaiss, MSLS | October 17, 2006 at 09:47 PM
I love the visual representation of the collection--no doubt this concept will catch on with other industries. The display of call numbers when hovering is a great timesaver for those who just want to browse, or quickly grab something out of the stacks.
Posted by: susan, MLIS student | October 29, 2006 at 03:07 PM