mid-course corrections, library-style

My friend Matt went to the new Seattle Public Library and took photos of all the temporary signage that has had to be put in place to clearly state some directional/usage guidelines that were perhaps intended to be obvious. [update: apparently many of these “temporary” signs have been up since May]

the library was a great space filled with interesting things to look at and useful spaces, but far too subtle for an obvious funtional space like a public library.

ranganathan’s laws, updated

My pal Fred from ibiblio said he met Lennart Björneborn this week. I checked out his site and he’s adapted Ranganathan’s five principles of library science to the web world. Even though they are copyrighted [?], I’ll include them here:

  • Links are for use – the very essence of hypertext
  • Every surfer his or her link – the rich diversity of links across topics and genres
  • Every link its surfer – ditto
  • Save the time of the surfer – visualizing web clusters and small-world shortcuts
  • The Web is a growing organism