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Dr. Anomaly

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Bleah.  Seattle Central Public Library is interesting to see from the outside, but for actual use, the inside is not as functional as a more conventional layout, by factors of several.  It's the same sort of significant downgrade in usefulness that occurred when classical card catalogs were replaced by electronic catalog systems.  It dictatorially imposes a strictly linear search process on the user, and all but punishes them for being very familiar with their subject matter and allied topics by forcing irrelevant items into their way as they search for useful items.

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2 minutes ago, Cancer said:

Bleah.  Seattle Central Public Library is interesting to see from the outside, but for actual use, the inside is not as functional as a more conventional layout, by factors of several.

 

That's disappointing to hear. Several of these were either one or the other, I noted. Maybe interior and exterior is too hard tricky to pull off. 

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7 minutes ago, Cancer said:

Bleah.  Seattle Central Public Library is interesting to see from the outside, but for actual use, the inside is not as functional as a more conventional layout, by factors of several.  It's the same sort of significant downgrade in usefulness that occurred when classical card catalogs were replaced by electronic catalog systems.  It dictatorially imposes a strictly linear search process on the user, and all but punishes them for being very familiar with their subject matter and allied topics by forcing irrelevant items into their way as they search for useful items.

 

Back when I was a student worker in my university's library, the card catalogs removed from the Reference floor after conversion to the electronic system were moved to the Cataloging department, where they were lovingly kept accurate by the staff. Part of this was because they had already experienced the joy of missing and inaccurate records in the online catalog, as the electronic system had been migrated from an older system run by the library district, and several hundred thousand records were mangled during the conversion process. I had made extra money one term by coming in nights and trying to match lost records on huge stacks of green bar paper printouts with the new system's entries.

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18 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

 

That's disappointing to hear. Several of these were either one or the other, I noted. Maybe interior and exterior is too hard tricky to pull off. 

Well, the very concept was to make a single linear floor of shelves, that happened to be helical in 3-d space.  Sounds interesting, but if you find yourself having to go from the Dewey Decimal 900s (history) to the 600s (technology), you're literally having to walk half the spiral, or go to the central hub, take an elevator, and go back out to the spiral.

 

Those of us who through long experience understood why tape drives have drastically slower random seek-and-read times compared to disk drives could have predicted the problem.

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