> I'm sorry for my outburst about "libraries not being
> educational institutions." That is caricaturing what you
> said.
No offense taken.
> But have you tried the search interface Yee sent?
> http://cinema.library.ucla.edu
Yes, I have.
Now, I'm going to put my "usability" hat on and ask y'all to do the same. Compare the UCLC Film and Television Archive default OPAC search interface (http://cinema.library.ucla.edu) to our University of Texas at Arlington Library's default OPAC search interface (http://pulse.uta.edu/). They are both the same Voyager ILS, so can stand comparison as to the search interface itself (if not the data).
Look at the search tab labels. Compare "Recommended Searches" and "Complex boolean keyword and cross index searching with index specification" to "Search" and "Advanced Search." Which do you think most users would intuitively understand and know when to use one and when to use the other? Usability tells us that we don't want the user to be expending the all their time figuring out how to use the *tool*; if designed right, they should be able to (figuratively) just pick up the tool and start using it.
On the UCLA "Recommended Searches" search tab, a user has to decide what type of search to do (among twelve possibilities) and the reason that interface is loaded with search tips/help, is that for most of the choices, the user has to know one of the secret handshakes, vs. the UTA "Search" tab where no search type choice is necessary.
In the UTA "Search" tab search:
words within quotation marks are treated as a phrase
words outside of quotation marks are automatically boolean ANDed
the search is a keyword everywhere search [1]
the results are relevance ranked
either an asterisk ("*") or a question mark ("?") can be used for truncation
Author names can be searched last name first, or first name first. Titles can be searched with, or without, a beginning article. ISBNs can be searched. Subject headings can be searched. Same box, same search button. Pretty much any search will pull up relevant hits. No secret handshakes required.
If that behavior sounds Google-like, it's because that was the intention. <important>NOT because Google is the be-all and end-all of search functionality, but because Google SETS THE USER EXPECTATIONS ABOUT HOW A SEARCH INTERFACE SHOULD WORK.</important> When a search interface behaves like most users expect it to behave, you don't need to put all the search tips that explain why they got a "No hits" response when they searched on "Mark Twain" or "The Color Purple".
Does this approach mean we give up some search precision? Yes it does. Are most user's already acclimatized to that with the other search interfaces they use? Yes they are.
I would argue that there are also 'discovery' benefits with this search approach: A user searching on "hamlet shakespeare" will not only find hits for the play, they will also find works *about* the play.
Are the more precise search types important? <important>Yes they are -- I'm just saying, move them to the advanced search and for the default search give users a tool that they can pick right up and start using.</important>
> The "topic or genre/form" search option provides a very
> user-friendly way for people to get familiar with controlled
> vocabulary.
User-friendly? How are they going to know to pick that search type out of the twelve search types listed. Realistically, how many people do you think are actually going to choose that search? If you snatched a student off of the quad and asked "In the context of an online search of a Film and Television Archive, what do you think a 'topic or genre/form' search is? What do you think is being searched and what type of results would you expect?" What kind of answer (if any) do you think you would get? Just choosing a search type is going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads: "What's a credit variance search?" "I kind of know what a call number is, but what's an Inventory number and why and when would I search that?" "How about a 'pre-existing works' search?" "What's a holdings search?" "Or a SPAC search?" What does xref mean to the *average* user.
Most users would be saying to themselves, "Why can't I just enter the search terms I want and hit the search button?" The same way that they do in many, if not most, of the search interfaces outside of library-land.
I'm sorry, but the UCLA Film Archive OPAC is a user interface designed for librarians, not for end users. Now that may be what UCLA wants and needs, but I'm not buying that it is user-friendly. I would put all that stuff in an advanced search.
Please re-read the <important></important> parts before flaming! :-)
-- Michael
[1] In the Voyager ILS, we have some control over relevancy ranking with field weighting
# 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: Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:22 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] The problem with OPACs [was: New
> subject keyword search]
>
> Michael,
> I'm sorry for my outburst about "libraries not being
> educational institutions." That is caricaturing what you
> said. But have you tried the search interface Yee sent?
> http://cinema.library.ucla.edu
>
> The "topic or genre/form" search option provides a very
> user-friendly way for people to get familiar with controlled
> vocabulary. As I pointed out to someone on Autocat, if you
> search for world war battles or battles world war, you get
> these terms:
>
> World War, 1914-1918--Battles, sieges, etc.
> World War, 1939-1945--Battles, sieges, etc.
>
> Those are all see references (terms on authority records that
> are not the established forms). Clicking on the "more info"
> buttons by them, these established headings came up:
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations.
> World War, 1914-1918--Campaigns.
> World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations.
> World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns.
> World War, 1939-1945--Naval operations.
>
> When you click on the first of those, it is further expanded to:
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations.
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations, American--Drama.
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations, British--Drama.
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations--Caricatures and cartoons.
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations--Drama.
> World War, 1914-1918--Aerial operations, German--Drama.
>
> They take you directly to the titles.
>
> It seems the problem with the position you are advocating is
> that you're missing the distinction between controlled and
> uncontrolled vocabulary.
> If I do a keyword search for world war battles from that same
> search page, I get 18 hits. 18 titles. But there is no
> indication of how the various hits relate to each other as
> subjects. A person has to laboriously go through each one,
> and probably a significant number will not be what she's looking for.
>
> What you said about standardization of design is well taken.
> I don't own a car but rent them occasionally, and it is
> annoying when I can't figure out where the lever for opening
> the gas cap and such like are. But the acquisition of
> knowledge is, I think, a more complex process than driving a
> car. Driving a car is expected to be habitual: once you learn
> the task, it's supposed to be something that requires little
> or no thought. Research isn't that kind of thing. The
> question is, do we want to transfer the effort and expense of
> organizing information entirely to the users, or do we want
> to continue to do some of it for them?
>
> I imagine Selden is right about the transaction logs in her
> system. But more research needs to be done on the research
> behavior and needs of scholarly users. Those are the people
> we want our freshmen to grow into, and if we remove tools
> they need, it may seriously impair our ability as a society
> to produce high-quality scholarship.
>
> 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 Doran, Michael D
> Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 9:32 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] The problem with OPACs [was: New subject
> keyword search]
>
> > Selden Deemer wrote:
> >
> > Whatever the considerable benefits of browse displays (I read, and
> > took to heart Thomas Mann's comments), the fact remains
> that, when I
> > look at our search log stats, users (as opposed to
> librarians) simply
> > do NOT browse (and it's not for lack of instruction).
>
> I'm convinced that the underlying "problem" with our OPACs
> (from a usability perspective) is that they are sold once to
> librarians, rather than many times to end users. If each
> user was making an individual purchase decision, OPACs would
> have quickly evolved to meet their needs.
> I believe ILS vendors (who we often unfairly blame) are quite
> capable of producing an awesome OPAC. But the vendors are
> building OPACs to meet our (i.e. librarians) perceived needs,
> because vendors are smart and are in business to make money
> and they understand that *we* are the ones writing that big
> check every 10-15 years or so. As Selden points out, OPAC
> features that are important/essential to us, are often ones
> that our users could care less about, despite all our
> well-meaning instruction.
>
> And that is assuming that OPAC functionality/usability is
> even a prime consideration in the purchase decision of an
> ILS. Very often that's not the case, as acquisitions,
> cataloging, or circulation module features drive the decision
> and the OPAC is an afterthought. If we want to find out
> who's responsible for sucky OPACs, the first place we need to
> look is in the mirror [1].
>
> On the bright side, products like VUFind, Primo, AquaBrowser,
> and Endeca unbundle the OPAC from the ILS, giving us a chance
> to atone for past ILS purchase decisions (which can't easily
> be undone). One of the problems inherent in an ILS-bundled
> OPAC is that the 10-15 year (give or take) ILS replacement
> cycle does not allow for significant changes to what quickly
> becomes a calcified code base. I'm particularly excited
> about Andrew Nagy's recently released open-source OPAC; with
> VUFind, the library-land development community has a golden
> opportunity to craft an OPAC that genuinely meets our users
> needs. However, doing so will require that we resist the
> temptation to create the ideal OPAC for *librarians*, but
> instead focus on creating on OPAC that meets our
> *users'* search needs. I think that would be an OPAC that
> doesn't require instruction (however well-meaning) or require
> an initial search page that is 80% search tips.
>
> Just my opinion...
>
> -- Michael
>
> [1] Karen Schneider asks: "But the interesting questions are:
> Why don't online catalog vendors offer true search in the
> first place? and Why [don't we] demand it? Save the time of
> the reader!" I would answer that vendors don't offer it, and
> we don't demand it, because the ILS (OPAC) check-writers have
> other priorities.
> See: Karen Schneider, How OPACs Suck, Part 1
> http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/03/how-opacs-suck-part
-1-relevan
> ce-rank-or-the-lack-of-it.html
>
> # 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/
>
Received on Thu Jul 26 2007 - 14:31:11 EDT