I was reading Michael Stephens Lens Resources for LIS701 at Dominican University GSLIS by Michael Stephens and noted his book section. Not for the first time I noted that if you look at the book section, there's no ISBN number. I like the ISBN to be allowed to compare price's etc. By the way, this is not a diatribe against Michael Stephen's perse, as many library bloggers have done it. I just feel, in a Library 2.0 world, I thought we were also trying to make things easy for our users.
As Library 2.0 article by Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk said:-
To increase both your library's appeal and value to users, consider implementing customizable and participatory services. The Library 2.0 model seeks to harness our customer's knowledge to supplement and improve library services. User comments, tags, and ratings feed user-created content back into these web sites. Ultimately, this creates a more informative product for subsequent users. Your library customers have favorite titles, authors, and genres.
Although Casey et al is discussing libraries, shouldn't we include our blogs, and the pointers to books is the most important thing we want to impart to our users?
When I review a book, I usual link to Amazon, which perhaps shows a personal biase. But we could link to librarything, which would provide feedback, via reviews etc.
Obviously, we could simply just google it, but even this can take time, and simplicity should always be what we look for in usability. Or as Jakob Nielsen says:-
Usability's job is to research user behavior and find out what works. Usability should also defend users' rights and fight for simplicity. Both aspects have their place, and it's important to recognize the difference.
Well, thats got that off my chest.
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