Thanks for the info, Karen. One of the things I also want to look at is response to no hits messages at small libraries. My experience - entirely anecdotal - at my previous place of employment is that a lot of the students, especially grad students and faculty, didn't expect us to own much and so accepted a no hits message at face value.
Bennett
>>> On 2/7/2008 at 6:57 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle_at_KCOYLE.NET> wrote:
> Bennett Ponsford wrote:
>
>> Subject headings keyword - 40.31% resulted in no hits Journal title
>> keyword - 37.41% resulted in no hits Expert keyword - 31.98% Title
>> keyword - 31.51% Journal title starts with - 28.42% Title starts with
>> - 25.26% Author keyword - 25.12% Keyword - 20.53%
>
> It seems obvious but also interesting that Keyword is the least likely
> to get you zero hits. That could well lead to a certain "user
> satisfaction" with that type of search.
>
>>
>> One question is then, what do people do when their search results in
>> no hits? From just browsing through the logs, I can say that some
>> people just keep retrying until they find something they like, but I
>> don't have numbers on that yet. Nor do I have numbers on how many
>> people just give up and move on.
>
> Mike Berger studied this in the MELVYL logs for his doctoral
> dissertation. He was able to identify "sessions" and to see how people
> compensated for zero results. Unfortunately, he never wrote up anything
> other than his dissertation, which is:
>
> Author Berger, Michael George.
> Title Information-seeking in the online bibliographic system : an
> exploratory study / by Michael George Berger.
> Publisher 1994.
> Description v, 216 leaves ; 28 cm.
> Note Thesis (Ph. D. in Library and Information Studies)--University
> of California, Berkeley, May 1994.
>
> As I recall from conversations with him, users turned out to be quite
> resilient, trying lots of different angles before succeeding or giving
> up (from the logs you couldn't really tell, but most users moved from
> zero results to non-zero results). His figures also showed that the
> number of initial zero results was surprisingly high. I know when I
> tried to discuss the pitfalls of keyword searching with a class of
> computer science students at Stanford some years ago, their response was
> (in reference to search engines): "But I always get something." In the
> general equation of something v. nothing, something does tend to be a
> happier result, if even wrong.
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
Received on Fri Feb 08 2008 - 11:31:06 EST