Students use of search engines

At 07:13 30/05/96 -0700, Nick Tomaiuolo/CCSU Library wrote:


>Are librarians encountering evidence that these disparate protocols are
>contributing to end-users' confusion concerning the correct way to search?
>Or, if end-users are too detached to be confused, have any librarians noted
>that students' retrieval is somewhat off target?

I have been pondering this particular state of affairs for some weeks now so
your comments are quite timely Nick.

I read the article "Web Searching - tricks of the trade" in the May/June
issue of 'Online' recently. One thing that struck me was the wildly
different syntaxes the searchers had to employ to get anything like similar
results from the different engines. 

The variances are so great at present that if I were going to do an
exhaustive search, I would print out the FAQs/documentation for each engine
and have the wadge of paper close at hand together with the 'Online' article.

Now I am a trained librarian and I found some of the concepts difficult to
get my head around, so what hope for the more 'precision retrieval' challenged?

I am involved in training of academic staff in then use of net based
resources. Finding information of relevance on the web is one of the great
frustrations for the casual user. At present however they would have to get
to grips with concepts like, implied OR, nested boolean statements,
automatic truncation, relevance ranking and term weighting to get an
exhaustive set of results.

It seems pointless to try and teach academics (or students) all of this. 1.
Most casual users have a minimal understanding of the basic concepts of the
WWW let alone the intricacies of search engine syntax. 2. They don't have
time to learn and remember it all anyway. 3. It will probably all have
changed in a month. 4. Librarians already understand these concepts and have
the skills to search on behalf of users.

(Also I presume within a year or two intelligent agents will be alerting us
about resources before we even knew we might be interested in the particular
subject of them.)

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that as information professionals we
should steer casual users away from robot maintained search engines towards
the directory/ subject tree/gateway type of resources. (Preferably the ones
where resources are evaluated by people.)

Most casual users seem to exclusively use the Netsearch directory button in
Netscape presuming this to be part of the software and remaining blissfully
unaware that they are contacting different services each time they do so.

Librarians offer there skills for exhaustive online searching. Why not do
the same for the Web?

****************************************
Paul Hollands <p.j.hollands at lboro.ac.uk>
Internet Information Officer
Loughborough University UK 01509 222373
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/e_sources_main.html