Ross Singer wrote:
> With some time away from the keyboard, I had a chance to put my
> thoughts together a little better.
>
> There are basically two possibilities here:
>
> 1) People can find things
>
> 2) People can't find things
There is another nuance to this: how easy or difficult is it to find things. One bit of research that has made a deep impression on me is mentioned in Marcia Bates' "Improving User Access to Library Catalog and Portal Information" at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/2.3BatesReport6-03.doc.pdf
On page 4, she mentions:
"Principle of least effort. Probably the single most frequently discovered finding on information seeking behavior is that people use the principle of least effort in their information seeking. This may seem reasonable and obvious, but the full significance of this finding must be understood. People do not just use information that is easy to find; they even use information they know to be of poor quality and less reliable--so long as it requires little effort to find--rather than using information they know to be of high quality and reliable, though harder to find. Research on this behavior dates at least as far back as the 1960’s, when a major study demonstrated that physicians tended to rely on drug company salesmen for drug information, rather than consulting the research literature. (Coleman, Katz, & Menzel, 1967). Poole reviewed dozens of these studies in 1985 (Poole, 1985); Mann has a more recent review (Mann, 1992)."
When I've thought about this, I must confess that this is what I do as well. Perhaps I know that one resource is not as good as another, but I have immediate access to one and the other is a pain. What do I do? What do you do?
For years, this was one of those guilty secrets of my soul, but then I began to realize that it is simply a human failing. I don't think we can seriously consider changing human nature, but as the author stated, the full significance of this finding must be understood. Merely saying that library catalogs are better than Google, Yahoo, etc. and even convincing our users that it is better (very difficult to do anyway!) ends up being almost irrelevant if the library catalog is still too difficult for people to use. Google is easy and its problems are very cleverly hidden away. In comparison, the problems of library catalogs are in your face. And all the preaching and moralizing will not change user behavior on this point, except perhaps to make them feel even more guilty as they continue to do what everybody else does.
One possibility would be (as Ms. Bates goes on to say) that training users would make using library catalogs simpler. But anybody who has done any information literacy training knows it goes only so far, and anyway, even if somebody actually can use it in year 1, they'll have forgotten after a few years of not using it anyway. Of course they'll go back to Google.
While I firmly believe that library catalogs and consequently, library catalogers are absolutely necessary for the very survival of a library, we are forced into a situation where we must make the catalog far easier to use *and* to provide quick, simple easy help in novel and non-threatening ways. I don't think it necessarily follows that library records themselves must change, although perhaps they will somewhat. The way they are accessed, displayed and created must change significantly, without a doubt, but if it doesn't change, I fear that it won't just be the catalogers who go down the tubes.
James Weinheimer
Received on Thu Feb 12 2009 - 03:33:23 EST