I agree it is not a dumb question, but I wonder about how we use this question in much of the discourse we have about catalogs and users. It sometimes serves as a challenge to others to provide some evidence of how they think users behave when seeking information. And it is often accompanied by a lament that the evidence isn't documented, or that some highly specific user study must be done before we do something like build on FRBR user tasks, for instance. The effect of the question then seems to me to often be one that derails a discussion. Any productive exchange of ideas tends to get shut down as we berate ourselves for not doing enough or the right user studies. So I'd like to turn the question upside down and ask what user need for information search and retrieval exists that we don't already know well enough to act usefully or successfully on it? It seems to me that none of the faults with library information systems or their analogs in commercial search tools like !
Google or Amazon or L.L. Bean's catalog arise from our ignorance of what users really want. I suspect that these faults begin with poor conceptualization of the purpose of the search tool, its limits--what it will do well and what it will do poorly, and communicating that purpose and those limits immediately and more or less intuitively to the users. Google has done this well. It does some things very well and others not at all, but it only gets evaluated by users on what it does well. Try using it to get the complete works of shakespeare and then try to re-order that result set in Google by date of their composition and not their publication. No one would do that. We know that is not what Google does. Google may help us find an article or book that has tried to date and order Shakespeare's works in this way. And so might a library catalog or an indexing service. We use different tools for different work.
Thank you.
Matthew Beacom
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Janet Hill noted: "...we should be very very careful about generalizing about 'what users actually want or need.'"
Point well taken. But it does make me wonder: what DO we know about what users actually want or need? Isn't it in our best interests to be well versed in users' true wants and needs? But do we actually know? If yes, where is this documented? If no, why don't we know?
Dumb question, maybe. But I'm curious.
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To which I reply: It's not a dumb question. In is probably THE question. And we spend too little time and too few resources addressing it.
janet
Received on Thu Aug 11 2011 - 17:54:49 EDT