Links back into IA & OL in top left corner

Brewster and George,

I am writing about a change in site navigation that happened a couple of months ago, where the user who comes to a book via Archive.org is sent to Open Library if they click on the book title link in the upper left corner. Previously, the link took the user back to the metadata page that they started on at the Archive. This has caused a lot of confusion I think. I am hearing from Xephyr our scanner at Brown that many of the users there are confused by the change – when they hit the link mentioned, they go to Open Library, which is fine, but then there is no obvious way (except for a very small link not well labeled) to get back to the Archive page for the book. When one is doing a search or working through a collection of books, this is lost if you have started at the Archive, as well as access to the generally deeper metadata on the Archive page. While I understand that there is a desire to get users into the Open Library, I don’t think we should do that at the expense of good and clear navigation. Perhaps we could have the link go back to Archive.org if the user came from there, or back to Open Library if they came from Open Library. Also, clearer and more obvious links to both places from the pages at the Archive and Open Library would help.

Best, David

David Rumsey

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Mang - wondering if you can make the top line the link to archive.org record, and the "On openlibrary.org" a link back to OL?