Bottom Line on Electronic Libraries

[Diane Nahl]

Has there been any research on how many librarians or search assistants
are needed at the terminals?  I'd like to know about it.

I have done field studies at my university and I find that novices may
appear to be happily clicking, but a closer look reveals that there are
many information needs going unmet because they don't understand basic or
advanced system requirements.  I have a taxonomy of over twenty categories
of problems novices encounter with cd-rom database searching, and I have
some new data from novices using Web search engines that I'm in the
process of analyzing.  So far it looks like they have even more problems
than with cd-rom databases. 

Why does the corporate world spend 15 billion per year on IT training? 
When I wander through libraries with distributed terminals and
workstations I observe many user problems and struggles that go virtually
unnoticed by librarians who are usually stationed at a distance from these
users.  When I go to computer labs with undergraduate lab monitors I
observe that they rarely help struggling users effectively and are not
trained in communication skills, so whatever the monitors do, the user has
no idea what it was that solved a problem, hence they will repeat the
error. 

If we see people using systems we cannot know what is really happening to
them if we don't take a systematic, closer look, then make decisions based
on the field data.

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_/  Dr. Diane Nahl, Assistant Professor                  _/   From now  _/
_/  School of Library and Information Studies            _/   on we     _/
_/  University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822             _/   are all   _/
_/  http://www2.hawaii.edu/slis/nahl/nahl.html           _/   lifelong  _/
_/  voicemail: 808-956-5809   FAX: 808-956-5835          _/   novices.  _/
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