Caro Castro, C.; Travieso Rodríguez, C.: Ariadne's thread : knowledge structures for browsing in OPAC's (2003)
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- Abstract
- Subject searching is the most common but also the most conflictive searching for end user. The aim of this paper is to check how users expressions match subject headings and to prove if knowledge structure used in online catalogs enhances searching effectiveness. A bibliographic revision about difficulties in subject access and proposed methods to improve it is also presented. For the empirical analysis, transaction logs from two university libraries, online catalogs (CISNE and FAMA) were collected. Results show that more than a quarter of user queries are effective due to an alphabetical subject index approach and browsing through hypertextual links. 1. Introduction Since the 1980's, online public access catalogs (OPAC's) have become usual way to access bibliographic information. During the last two decades the technological development has helped to extend their use, making feasible the access for a whole of users that is getting more and more extensive and heterogeneous, and also to incorporate information resources in electronic formats and to interconnect systems. However, technology seems to have developed faster than our knowledge about the tasks where it has been applied and than the evolution of our capacities for adapting to it. The conceptual model of OPAC has been hardly modified recently, and for interacting with them, users still need to combine the same skills and basic knowledge than at the beginning of its introduction (Borgman, 1986, 2000): a) conceptual knowledge to translate the information need into an appropriate query because of a well-designed mental model of the system, b) semantic and syntactic knowledge to be able to implement that query (access fields, searching type, Boolean logic, etc.) and c) basic technical skills in computing. At present many users have the essential technical skills to make use, with more or less expertise, of a computer. This number is substantially reduced when it is referred to the conceptual, semantic and syntactic knowledge that is necessary to achieve a moderately satisfactory search. An added difficulty arises in subject searching, as users should concrete their unknown information needs in terms that the information retrieval system can understand. Many researches have focused an unskilled searchers' difficulties to enter an effective query. The mental models influence, users assumption about characteristics, structure, contents and operation of the system they interact with have been analysed (Dillon, 2000; Dimitroff, 2000). Another issue that implies difficulties is vocabulary: how to find the right terms to implement a query and to modify it as the case may be. Terminology and expressions characteristics used in searching (Bates, 1993), the match between user terms and the subject headings from the catalog (Carlyle, 1989; Drabensttot, 1996; Drabensttot & Vizine-Goetz, 1994), the incidence of spelling errors (Drabensttot and Weller, 1996; Ferl and Millsap, 1996; Walker and Jones, 1987), users problems
