9/21 Post

C. N. Mooers (1960). “Mooers’Law or, Why Some Retrieval Systems Are Used and Others Are Not. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,  1996 vol:23 iss:1 (via ProQuest database) 

This article encapsulates a lot of different reasons on why users tend to use certain systems, whether or not those are the types of systems that would benefit the most.  Mooers basically states that users are kind of lazy, and that they are more likely to use a system that will give them less information, because less information means less work.  Supervisors will also prefer getting less information because it gets them a result more quickly, rather than getting a result that is well researched.  Librarians like the systems that will get them the most information, and have it be accurate information, but this also means that they must spend a lot of time trying to find it and then sift through it in order to analyze the information. 

This point that I took away from this article is that people are more likely to use a system like Google, which will get them a concise amount of information quickly, rather than search with more reliable sources for better information.  As a future librarian, this is difficult to understand from a personal viewpoint, as I have always sought out the best information using the best resources that I can find.

K. Antelman, E. Lynema, A. K. Pace (2006). "Toward a Twenty-First Century Library Catalog". Information Technology & Libraries, 25:3. 128-139 (full text available via CUA full-text databases – EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier, ProQuest, or Wilson Library Literature and Information Science Full Text – or at http://eprints.rclis.org/7332/

This article follows the journey of a school to find a better online catalog.  They use the Endeca IAP application which solves the problems of a lot of existing catalogs.  Many online catalogs are difficult to use because they are not intuitive for the user.  This application tries to better itself by adding spellcheck, returning relevant ordered keyword searches, and improving subject heading access.  The end result of the study on this new catalog proved that the Endeca IAP application provides more accurate and relevant search results and is overall a better fit for this institution.

I think that online catalogs are one of the biggest problems that libraries have to work with.  At my own public library, our catalog does not return results based on relevancy at all, it is hard to find the location of the item, and it holds a lot of inaccurate information.  If more institutions were to carefully consider the catalog for its users, they might be able to deliver better service.

Question for class: Should librarians try to change the way people search for information and the systems they use?  Or should they develop systems that are more targeted to how the user searches?