Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

it's pretty interesting. I think I had fallen into a dangerous librarian habit of underestimating what users are willing to do. I know that I insist on the ability to switch myself to the complicated search mechanisms, but I think we tend to default to thinking that users who use simple mechanisms aren't willing to think at all about what they're looking for, and I take this conversation as evidence that's not true. And users might not know jargon, and they might not be willing to pull through a bunch of dropdowns for Boolean search, but they're perfectly willing to distinguish between an image and a newspaper article and a web page and a scholarly article.