Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
> I'd just like to add that the skill of the user must be taken into account in this analysis. For a skilled user of a catalog, very often the catalog is much, much better, e.g. for finding items issued by corporate bodies (and people do want this). Therefore, as the skill goes up, the catalog's utility increases, and at the same time, the evident lack of control in Google becomes increasingly obvious.
>
I have to admit I'm skeptical. It would be good to see some evidence
based on a sample of actual users showing this to be true.
My anecdotal experience is that even our grad students and faculty
prefer not to use the catalog. Of course, perhaps even our grad
students and faculty don't count as "skilled users", you need to be a
certain kind of librarian to count?
> But people naturally gravitate to what seems to be the easiest, which normally translates into the path that takes the least energy, not necessarily the best.
>
>
>
This is just ordinary human nature, and even experienced researchers,
and even librarians, are subject to it. Even most of us are. Everyone
is intuitively balancing how much time something will take them with the
quality of what they get. There's a certain sweet spot where the quality
is 'good enough', and getting incrementally better results is not going
to be worth a significant increase in time/effort.
That's the human nature we have to design for, we don't get to pick new
ways for humans to work. (And I don't particularly think that's an
irrational way for humans to behave, myself). Of course, sometimes
people will not pick the 'optimal' solution. We can try, through
education, to show them that a solution different than the one they are
using is either easier/more convenient than they thought, or so much
more powerful than they thought that it's worth the extra time.
The former is more likely to be succesful than the latter -- because the
user is probably convinced that the solution they are using is already
"good enough".
But I don't think it's just a PR issue we have before us, that can be
changed by convincing users of something. I think our task is to make
our tools _actually_ more powerful _and_ more convenient/quicker. I
don't think most users are wrong to choose non-catalog services for most
tasks, as the sweet spot balancing 'good enough' and time spent. But
yeah, there are things that Google (et al) do NOT do very well. That our
catalogs _ in theory_ do better. The problem is that our catalogs don't
do them very well either, and that our catalogs are too hard to use. If
we want to serve the users by providing services to do what (eg) Google
won't, we've got to make our services more powerful and easier to use.
Just complaining that we wished our users would use our services instead
isn't going to cut it.
Jonathan
Received on Fri May 08 2009 - 10:41:10 EDT