[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[Jimm Wetherbee]

| Also, the user is smart in the sense that he or she brings task knowledge
| to
| each new tool and assesses the tool accordingly. If a new tool is
| needlessly
| hard to use--which I believe is the point that was originally made--then
| the
| user is going to have trouble using it. What is to bring the user back to
| that tool again? If we're counting on specialized user training, we lost
| that battle because most people don't need to go through us any more to
| get
| to a computer and the Internet.
[--jimm replies]  Or to use another example that I heard not long ago, why
do we insist that one must still look up a person's name last-name-first
when search engines really don't care?

It more than just the simple interface that Google and its ilk provide,
however.  With Google one can be pretty much assured that whatever the topic
he or she will find something and often enough in more than one format. How
many times have we seen a patron search for a journal article on the online
catalog or worse, use the wrong database for an article?  The problem is not
all of our making, but we seem to be stuck between federated searches which
seem especially slow and tend to diminish the qualities of individual
databases or presenting patrons with a vast array of individual databases.

--jimm

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