Janet Hill wrote:
> We don't expect people to know how to drive a car without some instruction.
> Using your phone, camera, DVD player, or IPod takes some learning. People
> don't instinctively know how to create a personal web page or make waffles.
> (Yes, I know I'm talking about in extremes, here).
>
> There is at present no way to make everything about searching for
> information on the internet (or in library catalogs) completely transparent,
> totally intuitive and at the same time totally effective. People must be
> willing to learn and apply SOMETHING to the process. But, we still want
> them not to have to learn more than they have the tolerance for .....
> understanding that the tolerance of most people is pretty low.
>
I think we can agree that we aren't trying to design for people raised
in the wild without human contact, or those in a coma. We are expecting
a person relatively versed in our society, and with normal language skills.
Say you're designing a library system, and you decide that the language
of the catalog should be Latin, because it's universal. Your users don't
know Latin, but they could learn it in order to use the catalog. The
argument against that is that they will spent more time learning to use
the catalog than making use of its contents, the latter being the actual
goal of your educational institution.
The language of our catalogs is "Librarianish." It is not a language
that our users speak. They don't understand "s. l." or "[12],315,[9]p."
or "Hamlet. Danish. 1937" even those these are totally clear to those of
us who do speak Librarianish. I would like to see some reasonable
explanation for why we can't use the language of our users in our
catalog: "no place listed" "about 356 p." "Hamlet, in Danish, published
in 1937" or "Hamlet" + language facet: "Danish + publication date facet:
"1937". This doesn't mean that the Librarianish cannot be in the record
or that we give up precision; it's about how we interface with the
users, including giving them options to see the Librarianish if they
speak that language. But we mustn't force them to learn that language as
a prerequisite to using the catalog effectively.
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 Sat Mar 14 2009 - 13:33:48 EDT