Nov. 20: Nicholson, Rose

Scott Nicholson's article, "Digital Library Archaeology: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Library Use Through Artifact-Based Evaluation," compares the science of archaeology through the ages to bibliomining and other research into digital library use. Nicholson suggests that library science has not grown as much as the pure sciences because of a lack of hypothesis-based research and traditional scientific process. The author stresses looking at patterns of use but also maintaining user privacy in the process. He states that "the focus of the present work is to understand the interaction between a user and electronic resources through a digital library service" (500). The main point of the article, as I see it, is that there remains much research to be done and the archaeological method is quite applicable in the digital realm. I agree with Nicholson that user privacy is of utmost importance in user-centered research. User-centered research seems to be the current trend in library science. The benefit of being able to converse with the actual living users of a system, unlike trying to piece together information from artifacts left behind by earlier civilizations, gives library science an advantage that archaeology does not have. By using this information carefully, library science can gain a better understanding of digital library users and create a better system based on their behavior.

Daniel E. Rose's article, "Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web," discusses user search behavior in a variety of contexts. The author notes that today's information seekers use more simplified queries rather than the complex Boolean logic of former information retrieval systems. Today most of the more complicated search mechanisms "happen behind the scenes, while relevance ranking determines how results are presented to the user" (797). The contexts in which Rose looks at information-seeking behavior are the goal of the user, the cultural and situational context at the time of the search, and the repetitive nature of the search task (797). Rose identifies three types of information needs: 1) navigational - for example, finding a particular web site without prior knowledge of its URL; 2) informational - simply finding information related to search terms; and 3) transactional - finding a service, such as a database, that will allow the user to investigate her/his query further. Rose states that despite these different types of user searches, "nearly every Web search engine offers users the identical search experience" (798). Cultural and situational contexts, as well as the iterative nature of the search task, further complicate user-search engine interaction. Rose suggests that Web search interfaces should take these points into consideration and that these insights might change the face of the search engine as we know it today.