Before we get carried away about the soccer mom, she too is an anomaly. Most
users don't use help, period. But Ross is right about librarians thinking
they "know" search-that is why I call "dangerous" foregrounding any feature
your users will assume they know, such as "subject search". It's an
affordance, you offered it, they think they know how it works, but they
don't.
However, the idea that there is the catalog and its resources and there are
"external" ancillary services that don't belong there is the concept some of
us are trying to route. The OPAC is not the sun. The user is the sun. The
OPAC is one of a suite of services that can and should interrelate to
intelligently offer what users need (not "bury" them). Actually, right now
the OPAC does a great job of inundating users with vaguely similar items
poorly organized and labeled. Extending that, the OPAC would be great at
presenting a profoundly confusing system-sorted soup of every data set you
have in the library. Instead, why not provide intelligently post-coordinated
views of the data that don't require people to go to umpty-ump places with
umpty-ump heterogeneous command sets. Imagine a faceted, FRBRized view of
the library's offerings.
Karen G. Schneider
Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 12:49:56 EDT