Thanks for noticing, our primary goal is making sure a minimal experience catalog works (best we can) for folks in lower bandwidth areas, older devices, etc.
I've been meeting w/ John Gilmore (EFF) & RMS to make sure we're also testing, to the best of our ability, w/ privacy badger, librejs, and other tools to ensuring beyond nojs support that we have some modicum of assurance for folks who are willing to use js but appreciate a bit more care.
This is a great idea. One of the reasons Open Library Explorer is possible is we have a healthy amount of Dewey + Library of Congress classification data for our books. As you notes, Dewey has Literature 8xx. Library Explorer also supports Library of Congress (you can go to the settings cog and change the classification system).
Some classifications (LCCN) are better at encodind Author data and we also have a significant amount of author data in Open Library (we'd just need to integrate it more meaningfully in our search index).
Given our small team size, not sure we'll have the bandwidth to prioritize any time soon, but contributions are also welcome from the community and we (the community) meet every Tuesday @ 11:30am to discuss and unblock together.
One bit of "meta" feedback from me: I love Open Library, but I get stuck every time I read one of the blog posts - because there's no link to the actual library! I always hunt for it for a while and eventually have to go up to the url and manually remove "blog." and the rest of the blog page parameters.
Maybe I'm just missing it? But the big "Open Library" icon is not clickable, and even the "about" page doesn't seem to have a link to openlibrary.org.
Do try out the "Settings" cog at the bottom of the UI -- one thing that makes this interface so powerful is you can add custom queries to transform the entire library (such as to only show kids books, text books, or biographies on any subject).
I've been meeting w/ John Gilmore (EFF) & RMS to make sure we're also testing, to the best of our ability, w/ privacy badger, librejs, and other tools to ensuring beyond nojs support that we have some modicum of assurance for folks who are willing to use js but appreciate a bit more care.