I'm less interested in defining who users are than examining what they do
and working backwards from that premise.
I have a hypothesis: search logs (not transaction logs; but special logs
that generate information about search behavior) for a wide variety of
libraries would yield highly similar data on the types of queries performed
by users-right down to top queries, lowest queries, top successes, top no
hits, and patterns such as number of terms and complexity of queries.
I have a bet: most libraries don't generate search logs or any similar
search analytics for their user behavior. Much, much discussion; little,
little data.
I have an observation: companies such as Google aren't spending a lot of
time worrying about their various "communities." That's not to say that
it's necessarily bad to do so... but as an initial preoccupation, we may be
barking up the wrong tree.
Why don't we start from the user data and work backwards? Re search logs,
I'll show you mine if you show me yours...and we aren't even an OPAC (though
due to our name a lot of users think we are, as our logs show-something we'd
like to address by building better no-results pages).
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Thu Jun 08 2006 - 09:42:04 EDT