ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)





- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad





- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.





Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.





=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.





tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.