> > I have to admit the use of 'See: ' doesn't make a huge amount of
> > sense to me - if we (librarians/systems) know what the synonym is,
> > then why do we feel the need to 'educate' the user (see the What
> > Users Understand thread)?
> Of course. That's not the issue.
>
I'm glad we agree :) But I'm not sure this is so quickly dismissed. We have several overlapping discussions going on at the moment, but there is the question of what the user needs to know to make good use of this index browsing. I'd suggest that browse indexes are the not the problem - I've seen no evidence that in general the idea of browsing a sorted list of terms and choosing one to retrieve all the relevant information causes any type of problem.
However, browsing a structured thesaurus/authority file/taxonomy - call it what you like - is less common or straightforward. What isn't clear to me is whether this is about implementation or about the nature of structured taxonomies (my guess is that it is a combination). In general I don't think library users need teaching how to use a telephone book - but when the telephone book starts to say things like "See, See Also, and Narrower Term References:
* Broader Terms not currently available" when you look for Leo Tolstoy's number it starts to get complicated :)
> We are talking of "index browsing", not "browsing" in all its broad,
> general, everyday usage. Think of this like browsing the index of
> a book, an alphanumerical arrangement. Only that in a database index
> you don't physically flip pages but click links to get the results
> behind the index entries. Or, for that matter, to be taken forthwith to
> the synonym or alternate form of name or whatever. The point is that
> the index gives you serendipitous context from which to go on
> and explore terms you didn't happen to think of but find useful.
> Something to which keyword searching, for all its merits, just cannot
> be
> equivalent - for it cannot show you what you missed. Good index
> browsing
> offers help and insight in an unobtrusive way - once the user
> understands what an index actually is. If the latter is inachievable,
> then of course that concept is doomed, for better or worse. (Consult
> Jims latest posting do decide which.)
>
OK - I really feel we need to get more specific terminology here - for me "index browsing" suggests the ability to browse a list of terms pulled from records you have in the database. This could be a keyword index - but I'm not sure browsing a keyword index is really very sensible or useful.
As far as I can see you are not talking about this, but talking about taxonomy browsing? We have already established I think that an actual alphabetical list of LCSH is not what you are looking for, but rather some way of exploring LCSH in a way that hides some of the complexity until the time it is useful to the user?
I think the idea that keyword searching cannot show you what you missed needs exploring - as instinctively I believe this is a function of the User experience not of the approach they have taken. This is one of the things that the 'facets' uncovered by the type of NGCs we are currently seeing - however the question of how this helps the user is a slightly different one.
To take for example the NLA VuFind implementation - since I've got it to hand :)
Let's say I'm interested in the book "Daredevils of the skies" by Norman Ellison and similar literature.
If I do a keyword search for 'Daredevils' then one of the facets I see is the subject heading "Air pilots -- Australia -- Biography -- Juvenile literature". At the moment this implementation only allows me to narrow my search to this subject heading - but there is absolutely no reason why there shouldn't also be an option to 'broaden' my search to include all items with this heading - this is an user experience/interface design choice - nothing to do with where I started my search.
However, even without this 'Broaden search to this subject heading' option, the NLA implementation does do several other things that allow me to explore the NLA collection serendipitously - the 'Finding aids' points up that the Papers of Norman Ellison are available *and* if I click on the book 'Daredevils of the skies' and look at 'Similar Items' I see that I can view a collection of Norman Ellison's slides - this is clearly showing me stuff that I would have otherwise 'missed'.
I'm not arguing that these latter points of exploration should replace structured taxonomies - I guess I'm undecided on the merits of this - but I am convinced that if our structured headings are going to be successfully exploited we need to understand what value they add, exactly how they add it, and then design a user experience that exploits this. I haven't seen anything that achieves the last of these yet...
Owen
Received on Fri Mar 13 2009 - 06:51:59 EDT