Subject Search Disconnect:
Or, How Do Our Users Want to
Search for Subject Information?
ACRL, 2007
Margaret Mellinger and Jane Nichols
Oregon State University Libraries
Objectives
• Identify undergraduates’ preferences for
subject searching.
• Discover undergraduates’ knowledge of
current technologies used in
customization.
• Share your experiences helping
undergraduates with subject searching.
How Did We Get Started?
• Strategic plan called for building “virtual
college libraries”
• Wanted to determine the viability of this
idea for our own institution
• Perception of a larger disconnect between
students and subject searching
What’s the Disconnect?
• Students do not
readily connect to
libraries and their
resources.
• More complex than
“students prefer to
use Google +
Wikipedia + Amazon.”
• Not a new problem
Disconnect is not new
• Librarians have known about the subject
searching problem for 25 years or more
(Yu and Young, 2003; Antelman, Lynema
and Pace, 2006;)
• If it was easy, we would have fixed this by
now - it’s not for lack of trying that we
haven’t.
Controlled Vocabularies
NT Taxonomies
NT Thesauri
NT Subject headings, Library of Congress
Pathfinders
Browse Lists
Right Communities?
Visualizing Subjects ?
User Input and Control?
Objectives
• Identify undergraduates’ preferences for
subject searching.
• Discover undergraduates’ knowledge of
current technologies used in
customization.
• Share your experiences helping
undergraduates with subject searching
Undergraduates’ Subject Searching
Preferences
• Starting Points
• Search Features
• Results Lists
Starting Points
•
•
•
•
Clear starting points
No prior knowledge needed
Task based information access system
Familiarity influences starting points
Search Features
•
•
•
•
•
Can use short natural language queries
Don’t use Boolean
Spell check
Did you mean?
Suggested search terms
Results Lists
• Results ranked by relevancy—acceptable
matches appear on first page
• Good enough is good enough
Objectives
• Identify undergraduates’ preferences for
subject searching.
• Discover undergraduates’ knowledge of
current technologies used in
customization.
• Share your experiences helping
undergraduates with subject searching
Preferences for Customization
Preferences for Customization
• Undergraduates
– Are not customizing often-visited web sites
– Prefer not to spend time creating profiles
– Are less likely than we thought to know about
and use customization features
– Are multitasking and communicating
Helping Students Find the Way
Recommendations
• Enhance library search tools functionality
• Make the library discoverable via the
commercial web
• Enhance users’ experiences of library web
Recommendations
•
•
•
•
Determine niche access to library resources
Market library services to users
Continue to partner with faculty
Continue to partner with others working on these
issues
Culture Shifts
Culture Shifts
•
•
•
•
Culture of innovation
Participatory culture
Culture of assessment
Web as platform for services (intuitive
search interfaces)
Objectives
• Identify undergraduates’ preferences for
subject searching.
• Discover undergraduates’ knowledge of
current technologies used in
customization.
• Share your experiences helping
undergraduates with subject searching.
Observations? Comments?
Questions?
• How do you think users are changing?
• What is the future of subject searching?
• What are you doing at your library?