Lincoln Trails Library System, Champaign, IL (hello, alma mater!). I’m giving a talk and then I’m talking to trustees on Saturday. I hope I can see GSLIS… and a couple of friends in the area!
Posted on this day, other years:
- Free Range Librarian, Volume 1, Number 2 - 2003
- Free Range Librarian, Volume 1, Number 1 - 2003
- FRL's Story - 2003
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Hoping to see you then.
Great job at the symposium. I quite enjoyed your presentation, and many of the others. I had a question, though. In the question and answer session after one of the speakers on Day One, you said, “We know users don’t search by call number.” Everyone seems to accept that as truth. In fact, our library system just had the same discussion with catalogers in our member libraries. However, I’m wondering if there is a study showing that that is true, or if it’s just an accepted “fact”. Is there a study out there?
Hi there! I wish I had spent more time talking about usability because people really seemed to like that data. Karen Markey has a two-part series in JASIST from this summer, “Twenty Five Years of End-User Searching,” which I highly recommend. It summarizes all of the research and provides good confirmation for broad truisms such as this one.
I have also seen local log files that show no significant evidence of call-number searching. However, the log files also showed a lot of ISBNs. On the one hand, a lot of this has to do with SFX. (This would be easier to determine if most search logs captured posts versus gets — what was typed versus what was clicked on.) On the other, I’ve heard anecdotally that users trust ISBNs, so perhaps that plays a small role in it. My gut feeling is that it’s really worthwhile to index ISBNs for basic search (and call numbers, too.) It goes back to that basic idea of not pushing any search to the advanced page if you don’t need to.
Thanks! I’ll check out Markey’s article.
I haven’t taken a close look at our own local log files. I’ve seen them briefly, but haven’t looked at them in depth.
I certainly agree that the more search capability available just from the basic search, the better. I’m a trained professional, and even I prefer just the basic search when possible.