Research: Information Searching Tactics of Web Searchers; User Behavior during the Book Selection Process; Analyzing Organizational Schemes of Information Resources in Library Websites by User Education Approaches
Research Papers from the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2006
Three papers online today via E-LIS. A search of E-LIS will turn up even more.
This paper examines patterns and features of query reformulation within a Web searching session. We pursued this study in response to the growing interest in the area of interactions during information searching. In this study, we randomly selected a stratified sample of Web sessions containing 8,030 queries from an AltaVista (www.altavista.com) transaction log. Then, we analyzed these sessions for query reformulation tactics that the searcher employed. Our results show that changing the query topic was the primary means to modify queries; and most of the time the users were inclined to modify nouns or subtract some types of words when changes were made. The searchers appear to know how to increase and decrease the coverage (i.e., number of results retrieved) of queries. We believe our study can benefit researchers in terms of understanding people’s behavior when interacting with Web search engines. It also could benefit search engine providers in terms of improving their services.
We study user behavior during the stage of the book selection process in which people study the content of a book to decide whether it will be useful for their intended purpose. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic; we report on the accuracy of the participants’ decisions, the extent to which they use the table-of-contents and the index, and the impact of the medium on the book selection process. We discuss barriers to accurate book selection and consider what can be learned, at the applied and theoretical levels, from further study of this activity.
This paper examines the organizational schemes of information resources provided in 38 academic business libraries or collections from 50 top-ranking business schools. A wide variety of schemes, ranging from a simple alphabetical list by database titles to research guides in which resources are inseparably embedded where relevant, were found to illustrate current practices in presenting information resources in the web-based environment. In addition, the paper develops a typology by which the schemes are classified and assessed by resource integration dimension, resource/user orientation dimension, and user-education approach dimension. This typology will assist in assessing existing schemes from the perspectives of both search and instruction as well as in developing new schemes.
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