I’ve been following some of the things you have been talking about here for a little while. Great blog.

I have a couple of comments on this post. First, wouldn’t it be confusing to have both “favorites” and “bookshelf”? Do you see a major difference in these metaphors?

When we were working on the early stages of VuFind, we had two competing tools like this, one which was a kind of temporary basket for printing out a list that expired after your session. My fear was that users would throw things in there and be confused when it was gone when they came back… so we axed it. And really, it is dangerous to have functions that are too similar, it seems like when they are that similar, they should just be rolled into one.

I looked at a few different ways to implement “favorites” and personally liked the lists feature within WorldCat, but ultimately decided that it made sense to do a del.icio.us-style favorites as a way to get tags on the records. This way when someone tags something in their own favorites, the tag gets attached to the global record. Otherwise I think the tag feature would go unused, without a real benefit for users to add a tag.

I would also say that you are perfectly right that it is time for the catalog to be part of the library site, not floating off in its own world. That is something I really hope people will be doing with the new OPACs coming out.

And as far as terms which users understand, that is a constant battle, but John Kupersmith has some great research on his page “Library Terms that Users Understand”. (http://www.jkup.net/terms.html)

…woah, sorry for the longwinded comment…

You’re right to point out the language issues in our OPACs. I’m guessing your academic library background has you confused by my usage of the word “reserves” but some public libraries use the word to avoid the negative connotations of the word “hold.”

All language needs a complete reworking, starting from square one. Some things might remain the same, but should only be in place if there’s justification.

But, mostly I just want to add to your list:
Selectable preferences for alerts from the library available hold items, items coming due and c. I might want SMS on those, you might want a Twitter DM, and Jenny might want an RSS feed.
(Not so much an addition as simplification) You should be able to get an RSS feed based on any search/sort criteria; if you can display it on a web page, you should be able to get it via RSS.

We still need to do more thinking like this about the services and interactions we want in our websites, instead of just offering an inventory of books.