thesis: loose thoughts and ideas…

I had the opportunity to meet with Karen Dewitt, head librarian at the Design Library here at NCSU. She had a lot of great insights and ideas to share with me.

Karen Dewitt brought up faceted searching during our meeting, and showed me the advanced search functions of WorldCat and the faceted functions of NCSU’s online portal. This is very much in line with how I want to structure my system—showing a flexible landscape of options and allowing the user to easily navigate through them. NCSU’s site does this especially well—the path of a user’s current search a the top, and allowing them to turn their filters on and off at will seems very useful.

I've also been thinking about where I might want this to live. Obviously, my system has to live/function closely in tandem with Google—within or in conjunction with an internet browser. But does that suggest a browser plug-in? A browser extension? Its own window/program that aggregates from Google and other engines? Or is it a completely separate widget/program that can function independently on the user’s desktop?

I really need to parse these options out and think about the benefits, affordances and limitations of each approach. Perhaps my studies can each focus on one of these approaches.