I think they were outdated really as soon as they were written. They
don't match a user-centric understanding of what our users actually do,
instead they are just inherited wisdom from a 100 year old catalog
tradition. True, in my last post, I praised 100 year old inherited
wisdom in how we conceptually model our domain; but I'm not sure the
same can be said for user tasks.
Certainly users find information and identify what is relevant and
select items of interest to them from their result sets. But the user
tasks (which are not really unique to FRBR but part of the Cataloging
Principles tradition; who made the first version, Cutter? I forget)
specifically say things like... heh, actually I was wrong, some of the
very particular language from the IFLA principles about specific
attributes and 'access points' and such is not present in the FRBR
tasks, they are more general, okay, that's an improvement.
I'm still not certain that these user tasks alone are the best way goal
posts for cataloging. Need to think on this more. But one approach would
be for us to make a list of the _actual_ things that users need to do,
and that our software needs to do to let users do these things, and see
how well the FRBR user tasks represent and appropriately
emphasize/prioritize them. I suspect that's the work that Jim thinks
needs doing too, not just accepting the FRBR user tasks which have not
really come from any actual analysis of the current real world environment.
Jonathan
Miksa, Shawne wrote:
> Jim--I'm a bit stuck on why the FRBR user tasks are "outdated"--I think that is how you described them. In just looking at the overall "picture" of how we've observed people interacting with information systems, what do you envison as more appropriate user tasks?
>
> For example, at the most fundamental level, don't people look for (find, locate) information that they need? They identify what is relevant and what isn't, tag (select) the relevant and then obtain or acquire the actual resources. This is very oversimplified, but it is how we approach teaching the user tasks in our basic information organization course ---the students create their own information system, based on a study of the users of the system and study of the types and attributes of resources in the system. We ask them to explain how specific attributes from the resources will help users to accomplish the four tasks, etc.
>
> Svenonius (Intellectual Foundation of Information Organizatin, 2000) discussed the objectives of a "full-feature bibliographic system" --redefining the "find" task to "locate" in order to better emphasize both the finding objective and collocating objective as discussed in Cutter, Lubetzky, and such. (this is my oversimplified quicky explanation of what she discusses in her Chapter 2) --her "tasks" include :
>
> (these may not format properly--apologies in advance)
>
> -- to locate entities in a file or database as the result of a search using attributes or relationships of the entities:
> 1a. To find a singular entity-that is, a document (finding objective)
> 1b. To locate sets of entities representing
> All documents belonging to the same work
> All documents belonging to the same edition
> All documents by a given author
> All documents on a given subject
> All documents defined by "other" criteria;
>
> -- to identify an entity (that is, to confirm that the entity described in a record corresponds to the entity sought or to distinguish between two or more entities with similar characteristics);
>
> -- to select an entity that is appropriate to the user's needs (that is, to choose an entity that meets the user's requirements with respect to content, physical format, and so on or to reject an entity as being inappropriate to the user's needs);
>
> -- to acquire or obtain access to the entity described (that is, to acquire an entity through purchase, loan, and so on or to access an entity electronically through an online connection to a remote computer;
> -- to navigate a bibliographic database (that is, to find works related to a given work by generalization, association, and aggregation; to find attributes related by equivalence, association, and hierarchy.
>
> It strikes me, too, that we talk of user tasks, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of them as "objectives" ? I'm just trying to get a sense of what you would rather see in place of what FRBR currently defines.
>
> thanks,
> S.
>
> **************************************************************
> Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Department of Library and Information Sciences
> College of Information
> University of North Texas
> email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu
> http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
> office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
> **************************************************************
>
>
Received on Mon Oct 19 2009 - 14:43:56 EDT