Rare Book Monthly
Articles - August - 2006 Issue
AE: We want to take you higher, higher!
Auction search results now link to the AED
By Bruce McKinney
The only constant on the internet is change. Sites are sharks. They move or die. With the release of the August AE Monthly we show some fin. We have moved the auction calendar to the top of the home page to make the upcoming sales more visible, have added features to the auction search box, and added links both on the AE Home Page and member personal home pages to better illustrate the site.
The Auction Calendar moves to the top of the page because AE is the only place on the planet where you can see all upcoming book, manuscript, map and ephemera auctions and search all the lots before the sales and see the realized prices after.
The entrance to this world of upcoming auctions is the Rare Book Search and Research box at the top of every page. Last year more than 160,000 lots passed this way. This year we expect the total to exceed 180,000. We cover 109 auction venues in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.
The addition to the Rare Book Search and Research that we are making is a common sense one. People use broad terms to uncover material of potential interest. Such terms however are often too large for manageable searches in the AED which has 1.4 million full text records. The answer is to link each specific auction search result to a search in the AED. So in upcoming auctions you may search for Mark Twain. A match you find is The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and you want to look up this book, not simply Mark Twain. In the auction search results we now provide direct links to do this. If you are a signed-in paid member you'll immediately see 35 full results in the AED. If you are not signed-in we'll provide a sign-in box. In any event we'll tell you how many results we have in case you are interested to sign-up.
Finally, both on the AE Home Page and AE Personal Home Pages we have added links that open into site maps with explanations of features. This site is very deep and we're committed to making it ever more useful and understandable.
