> Jenn, has that matched your experience, that users seem to be
> un-disconcerted (or even pleased) by automatic expansion of synonyms
> and
> narrower terms? (The narrower terms seems especially likely to be
> disconcerting to me, but what do I know).
We did our own user studies in the planning stages that caused us to think this would be OK. We haven't done any formal studies since. But we also haven't heard any complaints. :-) I think it works in this case because of the way subject heading assignment works - assign the most specific term you can but not lots of sibling terms. So if a user clicks on "sports" in a browse (or does a search with that term) that doesn't do this kind of expansion, they won't get the stuff about basketball and football and hockey and fencing - they'll only get the stuff that's about more than one sport. I'd guess that most users don't realize that, and query expansion is an attempt to get them that stuff anyways, with the assumption items with the more specific subject are still relevant.
> Does your interface have any way to turn _off_ this automatic query
> expansion, if the user doesn't want it? I'm not sure how I'd even
> describe that to the user.
We didn't provide that feature, as the site in question is very much designed for casual user exploration. In a system optimized for expert researcher use, it would probably be useful.
Jenn
========================
Jenn Riley
Metadata Librarian
Digital Library Program
Indiana University - Bloomington
Wells Library W501
(812) 856-5759
www.dlib.indiana.edu
Inquiring Librarian blog: www.inquiringlibrarian.blogspot.com
Received on Thu May 14 2009 - 19:17:25 EDT