I agree that many features like facetting are only going to be used by
'power users'. But it's still important to provide them.
I was thinking along those lines when I said that there should maybe be
some automatic query expansion, but with a clear message to the user and
way to eliminate it when desired. That method to eliminate it would
also probably only be used by 'power users' (they're the only ones who
would notice the message too!).
I'm still thinking some kind of automatic query expansion might be
needed for the non-power users. If only offered as an option (not
automatic), I think most non-power-users won't take it! And the nature
of our authority files says to me that sometimes it's needed.
Shouldn't someone searching for Alexandre Borodine have their query
automatically expanded to the authorized heading "Borodin, Aleksandr
Porfirevich, 1833-1887". LC authority # n80128710. (Note the two
different romanized spellings of his name there, the first query is NOT
going to get items entered under the authorized heading without expansion).
Tchaikovsky is another good example, of course. I think that some kind
of automatic query expansion is the way to actually make use of the
power of our authority files. I personally find it helpful to think of
the authorized name as a kind of identifier. So automatic query
expansion here is really matching their query to an identifier for an
entity, and then using that identifier in the query to collocate all
items having that identifier that matched their query.
Of course, there are various tricks with this, it's not necessarily
trivial and obvious to make this work right without getting in the way.
But I think it's an area which should be explored.
Jonathan
Kyle Banerjee wrote:
>> I too have been thinking about how to incorporate "see also" type
>> references from our rich bibliographic records into our search
>> functions. In addition to "did you mean", it's possible that in
>> some/many cases, the search should be _automatically_ expanded. For
>> instance, from Eric's examples, in some cases when the user enters
>> "Jive" in a keyword search, should the search be automatically expanded
>> to include "OR subject: Blues (Music)"? I think maybe so. Somehow the
>> user should probably be notified somewhere on screen that this happened,
>> however. And have the option to _disable_ it. A facetted interface
>> probably helps here--or maybe vice versa, it's me assuming a facetted
>> interface that led me to think about this.
>>
>
> Automatic expansion is a dangerous except when the number of
> retrievals is relatively small. Seems like a better way to go would be
> is to give what was requested, but use something along the lines of
> wikipedia's disambiguation pages to help direct the user to other
> contexts. I agree in principle that a good system should automatically
> adjust the search in intelligent ways.
>
> Power users like things like facets, controls, and whatno. From what I
> can tell, most people just want to type a search and get results
> without messing with anything. I like faceting, but statistics I've
> seen on facet use indicate that the vast majority of people either
> don't notice them, don't know what they do, or don't care about them.
>
> kyle
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Mon Mar 31 2008 - 12:55:48 EDT