[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[K.G. Schneider]

> 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),

The reality is that when you have been to Paree--the world of full-text
searching--going back to the farm of searching limited metadata is
frustrating and limiting, no matter who tells you otherwise. You can poke in
a few extra terms here or there, add a few thingamabobs, but you can't
possibly match the richness of full-text retrieval. 

> 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.

Because the ultimate bell & whistle is the one thing we don't do, which is
give the user the experience of searching not our own controlled vocabulary
but the item itself. 

I'm not saying we abandon the world of metadata, or even of the idea that
structured information has its advantages, but that we have to leverage it
against full-text discovery. Even six or seven years ago I recall teaching a
class in the online catalog and citation databases (which are one and the
same for various things) to lawyers and program specialists at the EPA and a
couple of them asking, "but... that's not retrieving the actual item!" It
puzzled them. They were right to be puzzled, coming from the Lexis-Nexis
universe. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com