[Sigia-l] Pre-Faceted Classification

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Listera wrote:

> "John Fullerton" wrote:
>
> >> This reminds me of a time when I was traveling in a developing country (that
> >> shall remain nameless) and visited a tiny library on a mountainside, with
> >> maybe 200 books. I looked around and felt that something was amiss. Then it
> >> hit me: books were categorized on the shelves according to their height.
> >
> > P. D. James, in her most recent novel, referred to admiring the
> > ordering of books by size for the best use of book shelf space.
>
> I should perhaps have emphasized the word 'categorized' in my story, for the
> man who seemed to be in charge there actually could find an arbitrary
> selection automagically. So for him the size faceting worked, I guess :-)

I've always thought that old book collections with whole sections of
matching bindings seemed a bit less usable on this account.

In my own bookcase I use size and color to pick a familiar book out
quickly, but group by subject.  If my books were grouped by size and
colour, it would be much slower to pick books out.  Different size shelves
do lead to some grouping of outsize books, but thickness of books remains
useful.

Basically this is a faceted classification system of sorts. Combining
appearance and subject makes for a fairly precise descriptor to find what
I'm looking for.

Visual coding (colors, fonts) is similarly useful on the web, but as with
books its somewhat dependent on familiarity.

Andrew