Improving Personal-Name Searching in Online Catalogs
Karen Markey Drabenstott, Marjorie S. Weller · Information Technology and Libraries · 1996
A sizable proportion of the queries users submit to online catalogs bear personal names. In fact, names figure into the most frequently used search types--author searches and subject searches. Despite findings of online catalog use studies that demonstrate the difficulties users experience entering queries bearing names, the basic system approach to soliciting user queries for personal names and searching for them remains the same as the approaches enlisted by the earliest online catalogs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of user queries that involve personal names and recommend improvements to the basic system approach to soliciting user queries and searching for them. It uses data and analyses from two related research projects to increase understanding of user queries for personal names and to improve the effectiveness of how systems solicit and search for users queries involving personal names. Improvements include the implementation of a new design for online catalog searching that features search trees to select searching approaches that are likely to yield useful retrievals for the topics, titles, and authors users seek, new methods for soliciting user queries bearing personal names; and enlisting the participation of online catalog users in the evaluation of system prompts, instructions, and messages that request input from them. A dozen years have passed since the landmark Council on Library Resources-sponsored Nationwide Study of Online Catalogs was conducted.[1] Despite the passing of those dozen years, several dozen follow-up online catalog use and user studies, and hundreds of dozens of new systems that have been deployed in libraries, the basic system approach to soliciting user queries for personal names and searching for them remains the same as the approaches enlisted by the earliest online catalogs. That is, online catalogs prompt users to select a search type from a list that almost always includes author, title, subject, and call number searches. Catalogs then display a dialogue box into which users type their query or instruct users to type their query following a prompt. Accompanying dialogue boxes or ready prompts where users type their queries are examples of queries or instructions regarding the form that user queries should take. A handful of systems feature name, title, subject, and call number searches. Selection of the name search may result in another series of prompts that require users to differentiate between known-item and subject searches for personal names. Alternatively, name searches may induce systems to perform both author searches and subject searches for user queries and distinguish between retrievals that are the result of these two types of searches. Since the introduction of online catalogs in the early 1980s, librarians, system designers, and researchers have had a very accurate tool to assist them in the study of online catalog performance in the form of transaction logs. Dozens of researchers have studied the access points in these logs, especially points that failed to produce retrievals. Findings from studies on online catalog performance demonstrate that the basic system approach to soliciting user queries and searching for them may result in serious problems that ultimately doom retrieval. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of user queries that involve personal names and recommend improvements to the basic system approach to soliciting user queries and searching for them. Personal-Name Queries and Online Catalog Searching Generalizations about Personal-Name Queries Dozens of online catalog use studies have produced generalizations about online catalog searching and the personal names users enter into known-item and subject searches that suggest problems in the ways in which systems solicit queries from users and search for them. These generalizations are: 1. …