I agree with Alex that relevance to users is a slippery slope, in terms of
how we can predict or ascertain it. I certainly find alphabetical by title
arrangement useful sometimes, particularly when I want to browse the works
of an author. Our catalog lets you jump forward and backward in a browse
list (jumping to a known title, or jumping a given number of entries). That
probably wouldn't make any sense if they weren't displayed alphabetically.
The catalog should offer a choice of "relevance" in displaying entries, and
many do (alphabetical, by date of publication (both ways), etc.). Number of
times circulated might be a good choice, too.
People have been talking here a lot for several years about finding out
what users want. We've done a bunch of LibQual surveys and focus groups,
but I can't tell that anything practical has come out of it. Most of that
has nothing to do with the catalog. Of course we have been trying to guess
what users want in a catalog ever since there have been catalogs, but
usually haven't tried actually to survey users. I think that gets tricky.
People here have talked about casually strolling around and asking the
occasional user, or constructing theoretical categories of users (commuting
undergraduate; resident graduate; research staff in the sciences;
humanities professor, etc.) I don't see much benefit to either of those
approaches. Doing a scientific study of users and the catalog would take a
lot of money and staff time, including, of course, researching the
voluminous literature about it.
Jack
At 06:41 PM 6/13/2006, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>Why does it makes sense to sort by title alphabetically? Where does
>that notion come from? Relevance to users is such a crazy field; I'm
>pretty sure that it *does't *make sense to a lot of users to have
>title listed alphabetically.
>
Jack Hall
114L University of Houston Libraries
Houston, TX 77204-2000
telephone:(713) 743-9687
e-mail: jhall_at_uh.edu
fax: (713) 743-9748
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 09:32:29 EDT