Michael wrote:
> 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.
As a matter of fact, a few years back my husband and I were on a trip to
Arizona, and we rented a Chrysler Pacifica. Late in the afternoon, it
got dark and started to rain. We were puzzled, because we understood
the headlights were supposed to come on automatically when it got dark.
But they didn't. And my husband wasn't able to figure out how to turn
them on. Then when it started to drizzle, we couldn't figure out the
wipers either, and finally had to pull over and get the manual out of
the glove compartment in order to figure out how to turn on the lights
and the wipers. They didn't work like any of the cars that either of us
were familiar with. The operation of these basic items was non-standard
enough that we had to look it up in the manual. I remember being quite
annoyed and fussed about the need for automakers to follow standards.
Perhaps this is a good example to remember when thinking about search
and our catalogs. If users come to us with certain expectations about
how search should work, we may do best if we meet those expectations and
provide them with a basic search that works the way they expect it to.
If our searches behave in non-standard ways, they are likely to be as
frustrated as my husband and I were with the car we had rented. We can
always provide any extra bells and whistles in the advanced search
options.
Irene Patrick
Information Technology Services Librarian
State Library of North Carolina
ipatrick_at_library.dcr.state.nc.us
(919) 807-7413
Fax (919) 733-8748
***********************************************************
Opinions expressed in this message may not represent
the policy of my agency.
All e-mail sent to or from North Carolina government e-mail
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-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Doran, Michael D
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 6:47 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] New subject keyword search
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 Thu Jul 26 2007 - 07:55:27 EDT