[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[Jimm Wetherbee]

William,

| I think there's this assumption that the current library tools meet the
| needs of advanced users.  They don't at all.  I've seen library web
| interfaces that come close to being usable, but very, very
| few.  Researchers of all skill levels use Google because library tools are
| so atrocious.  
[--jimm replies] I have occasionally wondered whether it is the tools or the
underlying data.  I came into the profession in the late 1980's--just as
OPACs were moving into smaller institutions and toward the end of the period
when librarians were the primary people doing online searching.  As I
recall, I was able to get pretty good results with BRS and Dialog (at least
the patrons seemed happy).  Our first OPAC was another matter, however.  It
was certainly easier than a card catalog (well most of the time; the card
catalog has virtues all it' own) but the results were never as impressive.
Even as keyword searching and ranking has improved over the years, the
results pale against the likes of EBSCOHost or ProQuest.  Now it may simply
be because we are a relatively small library (about 120,000 vols or so), but
I dare say my level of frustration with WorldCat is about the same (indeed,
Google Scholar really isn't superior to WorldCat when dealing with
library-held books). I tend to think that some of the bells and whistles we
put on online catalogs are not appropriate to nature of the data the lies
beneath it.  

My frustration with online databases is not so much the interfaces but that
it is not always obvious which is the most appropriate to use.  If it isn't
obvious to someone for whom knowing information resources is suppose to be
his occupation, why should I expect it of someone else?  I don't see
federated searches as necessarily being all that useful in this regard.  At
one time the nature of the information tended to go well with the nature of
media.  It was fairly easy to pass on the relative strengths and weakness of
material found in general encyclopedias verses specialized encyclopedias
verses monographs verses journals verses proceedings and so on.  Each also
had very specific finding tools.  It was all a bit too ridged and there were
other drawbacks, but defining the nature of a source of information is more
difficult now and we don't have the means to make that nature apparent.

--jimm

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