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No.1 Extreme Makeover: Library Edition How legacy brands are reenergized Advocacy: Something Wicked this way comes Tips and Tricks: Team library! OCLC Labs: Putting the E in collEction management WorldCat: A window to the world's libraries 
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Getting visual with the DeweyBrowserA new, color-coded prototype interface speeds searching and discoveryBy Diane Vizine-Goetz, Consulting Research Scientist and Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist The DeweyBrowser allows users to search and browse collections of library resources organized by the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system. The prototype was developed out of the desire to make the most of DDC numbers assigned to library materials and to explore the use of a Web development technique called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
Interface The DeweyBrowser is a visual interface that displays search results in successive rows of ten categories based on the three main summaries of the DDC. The interface provides the option of displaying the summaries in several languages, including English, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. To use the DeweyBrowser, a user navigates up and down the Dewey hierarchy by clicking on a category or enters a search term, such as one or more keywords, an ISBN or a Dewey number. The DeweyBrowser responds by displaying a set of categories that are color-coded to indicate where matching records occur. Categories with the greatest number of records are colored red, orange and yellow (warm colors) and categories with fewer records are green and blue (cool colors). White is used for categories with zero matching records. The categories in the top row of the display represent the ten main classes of the Dewey system and provide a broad overview of the DDC. The categories in the second row represent the next level of the DDC hierarchy. For example, when a user clicks on 7 Arts & recreation, the ten divisions of that class are displayed. Clicking on a category in the second row, 79 Sports, games & entertainment, for example, causes the subdivisions of the selected class to be displayed. The third row corresponds to the third summary in the DDC, the thousand sections. When a user clicks on a category in this row, 798 Equestrian sports & animal racing, a list of records assigned that Dewey number is displayed. Using the color-coded categories of the DDC hierarchy, a user can quickly browse a collection of records to find items of interest. The DeweyBrowser provides a framework for searching and browsing any collection of resources organized by Dewey. It is currently deployed over two collections of WorldCat records: the OCLC Electronic books collection (ebooks) and a two-million record subset of the most widely held WorldCat records (wcat). When weighted by holdings, nearly 70 percent of resources in WorldCat are categorized by Dewey. The wcat collection has been grouped based on the OCLC FRBR work-set algorithm, although the ebooks collection has not. The DeweyBrowser is also being used experimentally to view a nonbibliographic collection. This collection consists of selected data from the abridged edition of the DDC itself.
Technology The DeweyBrowser uses AJAX technology. AJAX is a term coined to describe an approach to Web interfaces that allows user interaction with a Web page without refreshing the whole screen. This technique (often called dynamic HTML) appears on many Web pages, but only lately have whole applications, such as the DeweyBrowser, been built using it. Using AJAX speeds up the interface by requesting only parts of a page. This improvement in itself is important, but by maintaining the user’s context, such as how far the page is scrolled, it can make the experience more pleasant, since the page is more stable. Refreshing only the part of the screen that changes tends to encourage exploration, behavior that is central to how the DeweyBrowser was designed to be used. The DeweyBrowser interacts with the server at OCLC using XML. The XML the server sends is transformed into HTML for display by XML style sheets (XSLT). Within the server the searches are carried out using the SRU protocol (search and retrieve via URL), a Web-friendly version of the Z39.50 retrieval protocol that has been used in libraries for some time. The SRU server that searches the DeweyBrowser databases is built in Apache Tomcat using Pears and Gwen, two open-source software packages from OCLC Research. References Singel, Ryan. “You Say You Want a Web Revolution.” Wired News. 5 Aug. 2005. 8 Sept. 2005 Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) Summaries. Electronic Books.
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