Since we're on the topic of pagination, it's worth adding that
"[12],315,[9]p." and the rest are just strings. Has anyone written
anything that turns them into semantically sensible chunks of
information? Given natural variances, is it possible?
Tim
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Karen Coyle <lists_at_kcoyle.net> wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> 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
> ------------------------------------
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Thu Mar 12 2009 - 11:09:35 EDT