Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2010 Issue
Keywords and the Future of Book Collecting
My Matchmaker Matches.
And now we have new problems to solve with another listing site. ABEbooks has two problems when it comes to the buying and selling of rare books: 1) rampant proliferation of facsimile copies, and 2) apparently in moving to updated versions of their HomeBase 3 software, they added publicly-invisible keywords. Where Matchmaker used to match an entire keyword phrase, now I see matches for "Indian gold rush" matching records only containing one of those three words. The implication is clear: ABE allowing keywords gives sellers the opportunity to fill their listings with unrelated and irrelevant keywords.
I'm not saying all booksellers are guilty of keyword spam. The vast majority is not; but there is a small number that takes advantage of listing sites allowing them. This is why Americana Exchange will never support keywords fields for listing books. If a keyword is merited, then that same content can find itself to the correct field in context: description, comments, provenance, etc. Simply adding "gold rush" to every Native American item because of their general proximity in time or location is irresponsible, and in the end does more harm than good: already I look less at my ABE matches than from any other source.
I firmly believe the future of collecting services lies in the mechanism the Americana Exchange has developed for Matchmaker. Once a member begins using the service, the old way won't make sense to them again. There isn't a more efficient way on the planet to find obscure printed material. People are free to choose inefficient collecting methods and they do every day. But once you've experienced the effectiveness of the service, you won't be keen to give it up. Who doesn't like to save time?
