Those of us with our antennae trained on cyberspace may have noticed a gleaming new presence on the horizon. On March 15, a new kid on the World-Wide-Web-block was launched, bumping elbows with the likes of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com: our own Juilliard Bookstore Web site. It is intended to replace the old site, which was hobbled by a plethora of shortcomings inherent in its design.

The new Juilliard Bookstore Web site has been designed from the ground up by a team of IT and Bookstore staff members to be as navigable and easily maintainable as possible. The navigability benefits visitors to the site and greases the wheels of commerce, as these visitors will find it easy to locate the items they are looking for, and hopefully, purchase them. The maintainability, on the other hand, benefits the Bookstore staff member who must frequently update the items and images on the site.

Among the usability features awaiting visitors is a search engine that retrieves results based on relevance. The visitor has only to type in the most relevant keywords to their search and they will be returned a list of results ranked by relevance. This approach is designed to cut down on the wading through the tall grass to find the object of one's desire. The most relevant item should be among the top five hits.

The illusion a good search engine should convey is one of finding a needle in a haystack. Now let's say, just for the sake of illustration, that we want to find any needle that has any association with the illustrious Samuel Barber in this haystack of a Web site. All we have to do is type the string of letters "barber" into the search box and we are presented with all the relevant items. Of course, this has to be experienced in order to comprehend the enormity of it. So try it out yourself, but start out with something simple, like "solemnis," or "turangalila," and let the amazement engulf you. Only when armed with a good search engine can one scamper through the briar patch of the World Wide Web.

Another interesting feature of the new Bookstore site is the way in which it greets you upon arrival. Is subtlety a characteristic of Web sites? Let's see. Your first glimpse of the site presents you with an assurance that you are in the right place, along with some interesting options (all clickable, in the true spirit of cyberspace). One option is to plunge straight into a category of merchandise (by means of a click, of course, on one of the top navigational aids). If you choose this option you will be regaled with four items randomly selected from that category. How else can a total stranger be given a fair representation of the full breadth of "Sheet Music and Scores?"

If you are a browser by nature (as opposed to the single minded shopper who sets out on a mission to find ISBN # X990324556 and nothing else will do), the navigational scheme allows you to tunnel into whichever category of book or sheet music you have a hankering for. You may start out on the very general sheet music page and, by a series of clicks, find your way to strings and thence to the very specific viola page, where you proceed to do your search or to browse in a general way. You may then begin to realize that you were only a violist in another life and that you must now retrace your steps toward the apparel page because you are a fashion maven in this one.

Nothing could be easier. Try it.