Hi Ted,
> Michael, if I understand what you're saying, it's that
> libraries are not educational institutions at all.
No, that's not at all what I was saying.
> People shouldn't expect to learn anything when they come to
> libraries.
Universities and university libraries are all about learning. However, students come to the university to learn physics, or French literature, or nursing, or whatever. The catalog is a tool that can either hinder or help them learn about what they came here to learn. They didn't come here to learn all the OPAC "secret handshakes" -- for left-anchored title searches, omit any beginning articles... author searches are last name, first name... subject searches are Library of Congress Subject Headings (or MESH or whatever) and will result in a heading browse list, yada, yada, yada. That's not what they are here to learn. They *had* to learn enough of that stuff to get by when we were the only alternative. Now that we're not, they're avoiding using the OPAC in droves [1]. Sure, there are Librarians and some faculty that have been using the OPAC for years and really know how to get the most mileage out of it -- but keep in mind that I did *not* advocate getting rid of the s!
pecialized searches for them, I just said the *default* search should be simpler, less prone to "no hits" results and not require a long scrolling page of search tips to explain how it works.
> I think such a course might serve high school students and freshmen
> well enough, but it's not going to do much for people doing serious
> research.
An advanced search is for the serious researches or whoever else wants, or needs, to learn the secret handshakes of library OPAC searching.
> Here's an anecdote
Here's an analogy that I like to use. At some point in your life, probably while traveling, you've rented a car. I'm guessing that when you got in that car, you (correctly) assumed that the pedal to the right was the accelerator and the pedal to the left was the brake. You were probably able to easily figure out to put the transmission in drive. Turning the wheel to the right made the car turn to the right. If it started raining, you probably had a fairly good idea, even without reading the owner's manual, how to turn on the lights and windshield wipers. In other words, you were able to drive a car that you had never seen before, because it was similar enough to other cars that you had driven.
What if car rental agent had said -- "Our car is special and to get the most out of it, you need to learn how a paddle shifter works -- it's really much superior to an automatic transmission or manual shifter and it allows you to get better performance" [2]. You would probably say "That may be true, but I'm here to spend time enjoying my vacation, not to spend time learning how to drive your car. I'll find another car rental agency." The reason you're able to rent a car, and go on your way, is because there have evolved some conventions for how a car works and where the driver controls are. Those conventions are not necessarily the *best* way (paddle shifters really are better if you want to maximize performance), but by utilizing conventions (one of the bases of good usability design) people are able to better use cars as a tool to accomplish the larger task. I would argue that our users did not come to the university to learn how to use the catalog search interface --!
they came to learn physics, or whatever, and the catalog is simply a tool that they need to find information in the larger goal of learning physics.
Librarians often think that new OPAC users are unsophisticated searchers, because they don't know how to properly search the OPAC. They may not know how to search the OPAC, but a brand-spanking new freshman can't remember when there wasn't an internet and has been doing searching for years. They are actually fairly sophisticated searchers, and their expectations on how a search should work are based on the conventions established by the 800-pound gorillas such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and the like. I'm not saying those conventions are necessarily the *best* way to do a search, but we can either harness what our users already come to us knowing, or we can make it our mission to teach them the secret handshakes. Since we have 25,000+ students, faculty, and staff at our university (and not the same 25,000 every year, natch), to me it makes sense to conform our systems to them rather than trying to conform them to our systems.
Sorry for the long post, but this has been a big topic of discussion locally when we implemented a simple, simple search interface for our OPAC [3].
-- Michael
[1] An oft quoted statistic from OCLC's 2005 "Perception of Libraries and Information Resources" study is that 89% of college students begin an information search using a search engine, and only 2% start with the library web site.
[2] Wikipedia > Semi-automatic transmission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_transmission
[3] UTA Library Catalog Design [blog]
http://opacarama.blogspot.com/
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
# doran_at_uta.edu
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Ted P Gemberling
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 3:49 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] New subject keyword search
>
> Jonathan and Karen,
> That's interesting. I hadn't noticed that it wasn't a "browse
> screen" in the traditional sense. I guess because it looks so
> much like one at first glance. And actually, I think giving
> access to a browse screen in that sense wouldn't be feasible
> with such a search: there are just too many heading strings
> in the database.
>
> As for the usefulness of this, I think the point is that it
> is a "browse screen" if you mean a screen that enables a
> person to "recognize"
> heading possibilities he couldn't have known in advance. That
> familiarizes him with subject vocabulary. Thomas Mann has
> given a number of arguments for the usefulness of this kind of thing.
>
> Also, while it isn't a browse screen in the traditional
> sense, if you open the resources it leads you to, then click
> on the headings, it takes you to a browse screen. So I think
> this does what a lot of people have been saying LCSH as
> previously configured could not do: give people an entryway
> into the controlled vocabulary, in PRECOORDINATE FORM.
>
> Michael, if I understand what you're saying, it's that
> libraries are not educational institutions at all. People
> shouldn't expect to learn anything when they come to
> libraries. I think such a course might serve high school
> students and freshmen well enough, but it's not going to do
> much for people doing serious research.
>
> Here's an anecdote Yee mentions that I think is worth considering:
>
> "I once went to a talk by a colleague who was working in the
> business world on an information portal. He indicated that
> the project had begun as an automatic indexing project with
> relevance ranking, but that the people paying for the work
> were so dissatisfied with the results that the project had
> morphed into a thesaurus development project employing human indexers.
> Is this a vision of the future? Information organization
> only for those who pay for it and Google for the rest,
> instead of information organization for all as a social good
> paid for with tax dollars?"
>
> Ted Gemberling
> UAB Lister Hill Library
> (205)934-2461
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 1:26 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] New subject keyword search
>
> Intersetingly, the 'browse' list appears to me to include
> _only_ those headings that matched your query. It does not in
> fact include alphabetically adjacent headings that did not
> match your query. If I'm interpreting things right. It is
> instead an alphabetically arrange list of LCSH headings that
> matched your query. Correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> To me, this is actually a type of 'keyword' search, not in
> fact what we usually think of as a 'browse list'---as a
> browse list is usually showing you ALL headings, starting at
> the point of your alphabetic query--but not restricted to
> headings that match your query.
>
> In fact, that makes it quite similar to the "facetted"
> displays of subjects we have been seeing lately, in that only
> things that match your query are shown. The differences are
> two. One is in the definition of 'that match your
> query'---here, your terms must match in the authority record.
> In the typical 'facetted' display, headings are shown if they
> are attached to a bib record which matched your query. So
> that's a more expansive (higher recall) type of search. I
> have thought before that headings that themselves matched
> your query ought to be given prominence, even if the more
> expansive list is shown.
>
> Secondly is that the typical facetted searches we see
> deconstruct the pre-coordinated LCSH headings into component
> parts, and this one of course does not. It would be
> interesting to see in terms of both user studies and analysis
> what the benefits and weaknesses of both approaches are (both
> approaches do have both benefits and weaknesses).
>
> And of course, a third obvious difference is that the typical
> facetted displays we have seen put the bibs that matched your
> query on the screen together with the list of headings.
> Whereas this one gives you a screen only of headings. I
> think there are plusses and minuses there too.
>
> Always interesting to consider the diversity of possible
> interfaces possible, to make the best use of our rich
> controlled data. Up to now, too few of our systems have even
> tried to do that, but it seems we're finally entering a
> period of innovation in interfaces.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> > Martha Yee reported this week about a great development in subject
> > searching, spearheaded particularly by Sara Shatford Layne.
> See this
> > page from UCLA's Film & Television Archive:
> >
> > http://cinema.library.ucla.edu <http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/>
> >
> >
> >
> > If you select topic or genre/form search, you can enter any
> combination
> > of words in the search box, in any order. The great thing
> is that the
> > result is a subject browse screen rather than a list of "hits," as
> usual
> > for subject keyword searches. It draws from the
> authorities, not just
> > the forms of headings on bib records, so xrefs are searched, too.
> >
> >
> >
> > This is a development by Endeavor (Voyager), so it is, I suppose,
> > proprietary. But I think it's a very good development.
> >
> >
> >
> > Ted Gemberling
> >
> > UAB Lister Hill Library
> >
> > (205)934-2461
> >
> >
>
> --
> Jonathan Rochkind
> Digital Services Software Engineer
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
> 410.516.8886
> rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>
Received on Wed Jul 25 2007 - 16:44:27 EDT