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Statement of Competency J

In which I discuss fundamental concepts of information-seeking behavior.

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The essence of librarianship or any other information profession is to organize the information under their care, and devise the systems that would ensure quick and accurate retrieval of the information when needed. Before the arrival of computers, the fundamental requirement for any information retrieval system was efficiency in recall of the most relevant documents. The information-seeking behavior or attitude of the general public toward these organization and retrieval systems was not important. At reference desk or circulation desk, there was always an information professional to help with information retrieval. The development of computer technology and the Internet required from information professionals to rethink this strategy. Fidel (1994), in her  article about indexing centered on user needs, concludes with a call for studies of "information seeking and searching behavior" because information professionals could not develop appropriate systems anticipating and assisting users if they do not know how and for what they search.

The fact that information professionals and the general public approach information needs in different ways was a well-known phenomenon. The art of reference librarianship is not to answer the direct question, but to understand what patron actually wants to know, and suggest a search strategy. However, how the general public conceptualizes and searches for information in structured systems, like databases, become relevant only with the development on-line digital databases. As the first OPACs and databases become available in academic and public libraries, it become apparent that the public had a problem dealing with these information retrieval tools.

The first response of information and programming community to this problem was to improve the interactive capabilities of the information systems interfaces. A new generation of database interfaces enabled easier communication between system and user, provided extensive instructions how to use various tools, and offered various ways to customize the searches. However, the systems also required understanding how to construct the query using Boolean logic or controlled vocabulary.

My EVIDENCE 2 for this competency critiqued one experimental study which focused on individual differences among users in the virtual environment and the ways to overcome those differences using various interface tools. The idea was that some people require visualization aids to make sense of structure of information in a database. The team developed an interface that could be customized so that, in addition to an alphabetized term list and one field of information display, had a computer-generated word matrix and multiple-field record display. The features were designed to add the visual mapping of the information contained in database. The results of the study were difficult to interpret and inconclusive mostly due to the bad design of the experiment. However, the study is a perfect example of why adjustable interfaces do not work. Self-configuring systems require users to understand their potential weaknesses in the particular virtual environment, to understand system configuration, and to understand how they can modify them.

A number of usability studies, as could be seen from my EVIDENCE 1 to this competency, found out that people have established systems, ways and means to acquire, assess and use information and that they are not willing to surrender the comfort of the known for the sake of a few gadgets. The general public did not use, or did not notice the advanced searching features, and they are quite unwilling to read instructions, familiarize themselves with the interface, and do all other smart things to be able to use the system to its fullest. The attempt to anticipate any possibility sometimes makes a system so unfriendly for casual users that it is simply abandoned.

One of the biggest advantages of the computerized database is the possibilities of the key-word or natural language searches. The problem with key-word search is the richness of the language. A concept for a single thing could be expressed in a variety of terms, allegories or innuendo. The human brain understands and makes sense of things in the context, and language and writing are constructed to take advantage of that. However, the computer do not understand context and can perform a query only for literal terms. From the information professional point of view, the key-word searches could retrieve an unmanageably large amount of information, requiring searches with additional terms, but that do not ensure that we really retrieved all and most relevant information on the subject. Indexing done by humans gives much better results than key-word searches. The main problem with human indexing is the cost of labor involved in the process. However, all this debate was cut short with the appearance of Google search. Although Google search engine uses much more complicated system than raw key-word search, its popular appeal is in the use of natural language, and the simplicity of the interface.

How people search to find their information was focus of the Primarily History project, the international comparative study that examined the information-seeking behaviors of historians in the United States and the United Kingdom. The survey report, reviewed in my EVIDENCE 3 to this competency, presented the analysis of the results gained from the survey of searching habits of historians teaching the United States history in universities across the US. The survey was conducted on two occasions and included 300 participants. The results of survey underscored the need for information professionals, in this case archivists, to understand the searching habits of their primary users.

The survey showed it is not always "build it and they will come," especially not for archivists and their web sites. For the surveyed user groups, the most important source materials for historians were the period newspapers and unpublished correspondence. The historians made very limited use of on-line resources, including the Internet. As in the studies of interfaces, survey found out that historians would persist in the use of outdated sources for the sake of familiarity with a printed form over more accurate information in a digital form. However, the most devastating for archivist community was the finding that many historians are not at all familiar with fundamental archivist information retrieval tools like finding aids, even in printed form. Making these resources available on-line is not answering to the popular demand but perpetuating the existing practice. 

The author of the report call for the archivist to engage in more vigorous education of the general public and historian community about available resources. The implication is that a mismatch between the searching habits of users and the resources offered by the librarian and archival community is somehow the users fault. However, as Bishop et al. (2000) noticed, people behave irrationally and that should be taken into account when designing the system. Systems that try to correct fecklessness of human behavior usually end up abandoned.

Bishop et al. (2000) ended up with almost the same conclusion as Fidel - we need to understand people better in order to devise systems for them to use. Although many hailed technology as something that would bring order and exactness into the messy way people do things - it seems that there no way to take people out of the equation.

Reference:

Bishop, P. at al. (2000). Digital libraries: Situating use in changing information infrastructure. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(4), 394-413.

Fidel, R. (1994). User-centered indexing. Journal of the American Society for Information