Thursday, January 19, 2006

what do you think of this hair-brained idea?

We have a great video collection and we know that lots of people want to pick out a movie for the weekend. Of course, that's just a royal pain to do-- you can't browse like at Blockbuster and the catalog is hard to use. So what if we had a Movie Library catalog...or maybe a Movie library portal channel. We would provide a search interface specifically desigined for searching and displaying records for films. We could do things like:
  • restrict all searches to material type "videos, dvds..."
  • restrict all searches to location "Eisenhower AV"
  • change names of fields from author/contributor to director, writer, actor, etc.
  • offer the choice of format -- dvd or video (we could do this because DVD call numbers begin with DVD and video call numbers begin with video)
  • steal from the ncsu catalog format and give our interface a side frame with links to all the named people in the record, maybe to genre types like feature film, comedy, film noir...
  • lots of records for films include a summary that would be good to highllight
  • wonder if we could get images like the ones you see in IMDB?
We'd want to work with someone who does film cataloging to see what other features could be pulled out. And I like the ncsu catalog function that allows you to return only items that are not checked out.

your thoughts?
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2 comments:

Susan Payne said...

Hi Sue,

I'm leaving San Antonio tomorrow, so it looks like I missed you :(

Maybe next time. I'd love to make it to the ACRL in Baltimore.

I have always liked the idea of library channels and think that would be a fun project to explore. I remember talking about this at Hopkins in the context of the customized list of e-journals for faculty who have core journals they have identified as important to their research.

Nathan and Ron, maybe, talked to me once about the technical requirements in setting that up...which of course I forget all those technical details now.

January 21, 2006 12:01 AM
Woodson said...

Thanks for reminding me. Turns out there's a way you can use your SFX info to create RSS feeds for journals. Might be a good channel.

January 22, 2006 4:38 PM

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