Long gone are the days when searching for a favorite book at the local public library consisted of thumbing through row after row of author, subject and title cards. Many a die-hard reader was said to suffer from thumb and finger tip burn as a result of this perusing activity. Most Americans under the age of 30, particularly those that took their first keyboarding class in the second grade and grew up playing video games, would scarcely know what a “card catalog” is. Now fast forward to the mid to late 1980s, when online library catalogs became a little more prominent, and the Commodore and Apple computer were seen as futuristic tools used in Issac Aisimov or Arthur C. Clarke science fiction works. For some, in today’s technology saturated world text based anything, lacking inter-active capability or a plethora of video is seen as archaic and useless. But for those that have a slight disdain for the old paper based library catalog why not give Ms. Dewey a test run.
The Ms. Dewey character played by actress Janina Gavankar taps on the computer screen and shouts “hello are you there?” when a user idles too long. Ironically Ms. Dewey was not set up or designed by any librarian, library advocate seeking to win back the latte guzzling reading public from Borders Books or Barnes & Noble. Ms. Dewey was in fact rolled out by Microsoft as a part of it’s 2006 viral marketing campaign to hype the Live Search interface.
Whether card catalog purists or librarian traditionalists think Ms. Dewey has any real merit is not really important. The Ms. Dewey program is whimsical and fun! Love it or hate it, library search interfaces like Ms. Dewey could be the new paradigm of online catalog searching. One thing however is assured: progressive public library systems can not go back to Melvil Dewey’s original paper classification list that was posted in early 20th century libraries.
