2. Ease of self-service
Sep. 16th, 2005 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deborahContinued from Openly Available Materials.
2. Ease of self-service
I happen to have a pet peeve, which is that the vast majority of smart people are much worse searchers than they think they are. That probably means I'm a much worse searcher than I think I am, as well, but I know that I'm a better searcher than most other people I see searching. There are standard library outreach practices which are useful for self searching. Better and more universal search front ends can be written for databases. Libraries can offer instruction in searching. Perhaps libraries can petition the major search engines to stop sucking and implement deterministic search, genuine quoted string search, and regular expressions searching, at least for advanced users. *impotent growl*
But how does the library do outreach to users to think they're better at searching than they really are? If the users think they're writing comprehensive and quick searches, they won't spend time learning how to write better ones. Sure, little lessons can be put into the library newsletter, but is there some other form of outreach?
As a corollary to that is the problem Too Much Information. There's so much information available that even if the user write a terrible, inefficient search, she will still gather more information than she could possibly used to solve her problem -- and some of it might even be appropriate and accurate. In this case, is the librarian actually necessary? Assuming the user is competent at vetting the information she has found (and I admit, this is another teachable moment for the librarian), so what if she's not searching in the best and most efficient way? She's found more than she can use.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tahnan was saying to me that he doesn't know properly had to use all of his institution's private databases -- but at the same time, he has access to more information than he could possibly need, so he's never bothered to learn.
And is that wrong?
Another corollary is Interdisciplinary Information, which is much harder to find for a user who trusts that his knowledge of his own field is so complete that he doesn't need assistance.
It seems to me that extremely good metadata from well-maintained limited vocabularies that are created by subject specialists in a number of overlapping fields would be key to finding useful interdisciplinary Information. For example, if a computer scientist working on an artificial intelligence project needs to find everything published that could be relevant to her specific project, she might need to look at philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, engineering. That would be made substantially easier if the controlled vocabulary in the search tool had been defined with computer scientists, philosophers, linguistics, mathematicians, and engineers in mind; and if the metadata tagging of the content had been done with all those groups in mind; and if the controlled vocabulary is clearly explained so the user understands what she is looking for.
Continued at instantaneous gratification.
2. Ease of self-service
I happen to have a pet peeve, which is that the vast majority of smart people are much worse searchers than they think they are. That probably means I'm a much worse searcher than I think I am, as well, but I know that I'm a better searcher than most other people I see searching. There are standard library outreach practices which are useful for self searching. Better and more universal search front ends can be written for databases. Libraries can offer instruction in searching. Perhaps libraries can petition the major search engines to stop sucking and implement deterministic search, genuine quoted string search, and regular expressions searching, at least for advanced users. *impotent growl*
But how does the library do outreach to users to think they're better at searching than they really are? If the users think they're writing comprehensive and quick searches, they won't spend time learning how to write better ones. Sure, little lessons can be put into the library newsletter, but is there some other form of outreach?
As a corollary to that is the problem Too Much Information. There's so much information available that even if the user write a terrible, inefficient search, she will still gather more information than she could possibly used to solve her problem -- and some of it might even be appropriate and accurate. In this case, is the librarian actually necessary? Assuming the user is competent at vetting the information she has found (and I admit, this is another teachable moment for the librarian), so what if she's not searching in the best and most efficient way? She's found more than she can use.
tahnan was saying to me that he doesn't know properly had to use all of his institution's private databases -- but at the same time, he has access to more information than he could possibly need, so he's never bothered to learn.And is that wrong?
Another corollary is Interdisciplinary Information, which is much harder to find for a user who trusts that his knowledge of his own field is so complete that he doesn't need assistance.
It seems to me that extremely good metadata from well-maintained limited vocabularies that are created by subject specialists in a number of overlapping fields would be key to finding useful interdisciplinary Information. For example, if a computer scientist working on an artificial intelligence project needs to find everything published that could be relevant to her specific project, she might need to look at philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, engineering. That would be made substantially easier if the controlled vocabulary in the search tool had been defined with computer scientists, philosophers, linguistics, mathematicians, and engineers in mind; and if the metadata tagging of the content had been done with all those groups in mind; and if the controlled vocabulary is clearly explained so the user understands what she is looking for.
Continued at instantaneous gratification.
