[WEB4LIB] Re: Two steps forward, three steps back

[H. Frank Cervone]

 > Perhaps a better discussion would be on what are good defaults for a
 > library catalog search. What are patrons expecting? I believe many
 > users will presume a keyword search is a Boolean AND search not a
 > phrase search. I also think that when they do a title search they will
 > expect it to search within the title, not requiring them to know the
 > first word in the title. Does any libraries have studies on their
 > patron's search behaviors? I'd love to see it. I only have what I've
 > seen while helping people to go by.

At Northwestern, we did a fairly extensive analysis of the search logs in 
our OPAC about a year ago. As a result of what we were seeing, we made some 
changes to our OPAC setup but have yet to reanalyze the search logs. That's 
something we plan on doing in 2005.

One of the major problems in our OPAC was that the default search was an 
exact title search. Not surprisingly, a high percentage of our title 
searches failed completely, that is no hits at all.

However, what was most interesting was the content of those failed 
searches, which appeared in most cases to be keyword phrases. In looking at 
the total of all failed searches across all search types, it was clear that 
keyword phrases were extremely popular, as were boolean keywords. When the 
keyword phrases failed, people often attempted to get a result by 
booleanizing the string. As a result, we've made a keyword search the 
default (explaining that boolean operators are needed). It will be 
interesting to see what patterns emerge in the data since we've made the 
change.

Frank

Frank Cervone
Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology
Northwestern University
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208-2300
847.491.8304