Ursula Schulz's posting about user studies and browsing (" ...On typing
in their search terms they expected results and not an index...") makes
me wonder how much we do and don't know about how users interpret what
is appearing on the screen. My experience with the early MELVYL catalog,
which had both a heading browse and a heading search, was the users did
not understand the concept of a heading, which is consistent with
Ursula's results. Both heading-based features confused them terribly. I
suspect that if we could have had sufficient granularity in our
statistics, we could have shown that browse (which made up something
like 2% of the total commands) was used primarily at the reference desk
and in the library offices. It's not the 'browse' that users don't get,
however, it's the fact that it's a browse of something -- headings --
they do not understand.
My favorite bit of user non-understanding is with something very simple:
the pagination. I have had occasion to explain to non-librarians the
difference between 'number of pages' and 'pagination,' the latter being
what is recorded in library metadata, but the former in publisher
metadata. (Each for good reason, BTW.) I often use an example that looks
like:
"xii, 356p."
I was giving this bit of info to a group of people who would probably
call themselves 'engineers' -- all of them working in academia, all of
them deeply involved in the semantic web, all of them with university
degrees. They got the difference between number of pages and pagination,
but at the end one of them asked me: "Could you explain what that
example means?" They all nodded. What they hadn't understood, in all of
their years of using libraries, was the "xii" part, and so they'd just
ignored it. When I explained that it represented the first pages that
were numbered with roman numerals, they said: "Oh!"
At the Open Library we recently got an email asking about a pagination
statement on a record:
[12],315,[9]p.
The user was concerned that it meant that there were pages missing from
that particular copy.
There's no reason why we couldn't keep the detailed pagination in the
record for identification purposes, but show the user a simple estimate
of number of pages unless the details are asked for. If we understand
what is confusing to users, we should be able to provide a catalog that
doesn't confuse them.
kc
--
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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
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Received on Thu Mar 12 2009 - 10:46:39 EDT