Blog Assignment #2, 5/27

The two articles to be discussed this week are both on information retrieval systems, and information retrieval in general; one is an article written by Calvin Mooers, the other an in-depth exploration of a library catalog system by Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace.

The Mooers article, originally given at the Annual Meeting of the American Documentation Institute in 1959, explains why information retrieval systems are not used as widely as they seemingly should be, and what can be done to change this. He ultimately concludes that a user won't use a system if the cost of having the information, or the difficulty of obtaining it, outweighs the benefit of gaining it. He points out that simply doing your job exactly as you are supposed to do, will often attract the praise of your superiors, whereas going out of the way, and gathering information, carries the risk that the information gathered will not be relevant, and that you have wasted time. It is thus better to say that you lack the information to do something.

This is less true today; not, perhaps, that people seek to do the minimum in their job, or that people are praised or criticized for the wrong reasons; but computers, and especially the Web, have made it much less difficult and time-consuming to gather information, and thus it is much harder to use the excuse that you were unable to find a relevant piece of information. Nonetheless, the fact remains that no matter how efficient or effective an information retrieval system may be, its use is limited by how much the user needs or desires the information, which is often determined by unrelated factors.

The article by Antelman, Lynema, and Pace, compares the state of library catalogs at the present (the article was written in 2006) compared to pre-Web versions; they reach the conclusion that OPACs have not reached their true potential, and explain some reasons why. They describe the Endeca - which had recently been implemented at the North Carolina State University library - and how it can be more effective than other OPACs. Most importantly is its de-emphasis on things like Boolean logic, and the terms it uses, that make it easier to understand for non-professionals.