There has been a lot of talk recently about the effect of the Internet (and new media in general) on reading habits – and the suggestion that people are increasingly disinclined to read a text slowly, thoroughly and attentively, from beginning to end, absorbing and reflecting on it. While I am sure there have always been people who read instruction manuals and others who take the new gizmo out of its box, throw the manual aside and find out what it does by doing it, I suspect that more and more people, because of shortened attention spans, the endless distractions of the online world, less time to do the same number of things or just improved multi-tasking skills, are now hoppers and flitters.
What strikes me about this is that we are still constructing catalogues for the methodical searcher, for the person who will carry out a search and then refine the results by facets, even going so far as to follow a “breadcrumb” trail and re-trace her steps as necessary. Do we still have users who carry out a search this thoughtfully? Or (and old habits die hard, so it may still be the way that old users behave), do we still have as many as we used to have – and is it what new and young searchers do?
I think that people are increasingly inclined to do a search and, if they don’t find what they want, they don’t look at the results and try to analyse where it went wrong, how to put it right. They just try a different search. And they expect to get the answer immediately, not at the end of a sequence of refining and filtering steps. I think (you may or may not agree) that we are wasting our time when we demand or design catalogues with “Advanced Search” functions, with Boolean operators and ranks of facets. We should be concentrating on speed and display instead, before the hoppers and flitters have hopped and flitted off.
Remember the old mantra - Librarians like to search. Everyone else likes to find.
I agree entirely about the expectation of immediate results. As a school librarian it is a struggle to get students to use the OPAC at all. When they do use it and fail to get the result they want they are not experienced or persistant enough to try from another angle.
ReplyDeletehttp://tochartershipandbeyond.blogspot.com/
So what is the answer then? How do you suggest the problem be solved?
ReplyDeleteI agree that library users tend to expect instant results, and to be able to use a fairly loose, keyword approach to searching. I think this is where some resource discovery tools can be useful, because they allow that approach to begin with, then present simple, visual options for refining the search strategy. I don't think most people are willing to learn more than the absolute basics of searching, so as you say, we need to focus on the interface and keep the techy stuff behind the scenes.
ReplyDeleteApologies if you have already seen this, but here is another perspective on the same issue: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-justifying-cataloging.html
Thanks, Judith - my kids (late teens) are the same. Even as children of a cataloguer (and you'd think they might have picked something up from me) they rarely know the whole author, or the whole title, or if they know it they mis-type it - and they don't know what a "keyword" is (who does, outside a library?) so they get frustrated and give up and just ask me, "Can you get [whatever it is] from the library for me?" So I think it will be a big step forward to get rid of labelled search boxes and just one plain simple Google-style search box.
ReplyDeleteLindsay - I agree that a "loose keyword approach" is what most people want and use. The trick would be, to have a sufficiently subtle and sophisticated vocabulary underneath to be able to refine from that initial search term (did you mean...) or widen it out (would you also like...). AND to be able to do that without implying that the user has used the wrong word in the first place!
I might do a post on the difference between narrowing searches and widening them - which do we and our users most often want to do and how can the catalogue help...
Anonymous - I know that it's more useful to be part of the solution than part of the problem, but at the moment I'm just thinking aloud.
It really depends on your clientele. As a National Library, we have a mix of the younger uni students, who generally look for a quick fix, more mature family historians as well as serious researchers using our extensive and unique retrospective and current Australian collections. We have tried to tailor our Catalogue to suit all types of users. From the feedback we receive we hit the mark on most occasions.
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