IA asks, What if you could wander the library stacks…online?

Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive has posted about the new (still in Beta) Open Library Explorer, created by the IA’s Drini Cami.

“Open Library Explorer is able to harness the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems to recreate virtually the experience of browsing the bookshelves at a physical library. Open Library Explorer enables readers to scan bookshelves left to right by subject, up and down for subclassifications. Switch a filter and suddenly the bookshelves are full of juvenile books. Type in “subject: biography” and you see nothing but biographies arranged by subject matter.”

“For music, movies, or books, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon use complicated recommendation algorithms to suggest what you should encounter next. But those algorithms are driven by the media you have already consumed. They put you into a “filter bubble” where you only see books similar to those you’ve already read. Cami and his team devised the Open Library Explorer as an alternative to recommendation engines. With the Open Library Explorer, you are free to dive deeper and deeper into the stacks. Where you go is driven by you, not by an algorithm.”

Visit the link above to learn more and try it out. It’s fun , and you’ll most likely “leave the library having discovered something new—usually a variety of new things!”