[13557] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Searching the electronic catalog
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Walt_Crawford@NOTES.RLG.ORG)
Thu Oct 5 20:16:57 2000
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 07:40:36 -0700
From: Walt_Crawford@NOTES.RLG.ORG
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
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Blazej,
>I need to find some information on the users' preferences regarding
>the search of electronic library catalogs. That is: what part of the
>users look for a specific author, book title, what part do keyword
>search and what part use subject headings. If you know about any
>research on this, I would be very grateful for the information.
The problem here is that different online catalogs work so differently that
numbers may not be comparable.
A huge amount of work was done in the early 1980s on these subjects;
unfortunately, that was a long time ago and (as is usually the case with
statistics) the results were interpreted in whatever ways suited the people
doing the analysis. So, for example, you tended to get the message that
"most people do subject searching" based on an analysis that turns many
other searches into "really subject searches."
I haven't seen lots of statistical reports for recent use, but others might
have them (I hope they post to the list: this continues to be interesting
material).
I can give you general numbers for Eureka, RLG's end-user search service.
It's not an online catalog but may be used in somewhat similar ways (and
about half of its use is of the RLG Union Catalog, comparable in type to an
online catalog). I do NOT believe that these numbers can be generalized.
Recent searches look something like this:
Roughly 40% of searches are Keyword searches
Roughly 50% searches are Author, Subject, and Title searches, and those are
roughly equal--with slightly fewer Title searches than Author or Subject.
[Say 17-18% each for Author and Subject, 14-15% for Title]
(Note that, for Eureka, Author, Subject, and Title can include both true
headings searches and word searches, but word searches in these three
categories
make up only a small portion of all searches, typically 5% or less)
Roughly 10% of searches use "other" indexes--journal names, abstracts,
specialized indexes for special databases.
Note: these figures are for the first half of calendar 2000, and are
approximations.
Taken with a few dozen other reports, that might be useful information!
-walt crawford, RLG-
