A novice-expert comparison in information search

In the age of Google, it is commonly believed that university students, especially those at postgraduate level, should have attained enough information searching skills to support their studies. However, recent researches have found that the information literacy level of quite a few postgraduate students is, in fact, far from satisfactory. One possible way for information search specialists to help students effectively search information is to use a novice-expert comparison to examine the differences between novices and experts in information search. The aim of this study is to uncover some of the major differences in the search query statements and information search strategies between eight doctoral students (novice searchers) and an expert information literacy professional. Preliminary findings show that conspicuous differences do exist in the complexity of the formulation of query statements, choice of keywords, use of operators between the novice and the expert searchers.postprin

“More than Meets the Eye” - Analyzing the Success of User Queries in Oria

Discovery systems allow academic library users to locate a wider range of resources than previous OPACs. However, actual usage of these systems may still be challenging. The main aim of this research is to get a better understanding of the hurdles users face while searching contemporary library systems.This study utilizes a transaction log analysis approach, using popular and zero result queries datasets gathered from the statistics module of a library discovery system. It explores what types of queries users perform, how successful the queries are, and examines underlying reasons for unsuccessful queries. To our knowledge, this is the first academic paper to use data originating from built-in transaction logs of the Oria library discovery system.The analysis shows that queries are often curriculum-related: we could pinpoint a relation with curriculum for 58% of the popular queries, and 28% for the zero result searches. A vast majority of popular queries refer to books, databases and journals, and over half of the queries used the title to locate a resource. 20% of the popular queries turned out to be unsuccessful. Zero result queries typically involve long queries, and in many cases consist of pasted reference citations.Our conclusion is that the examined discovery system is rather sensitive. Whilst this suggests the importance of increasing users' information search skills, it also points to the need for enhancing discovery systems and their underlying metadata. Furthermore, due to the prominence of curriculum-related queries, a better integration of curriculum materials ought to be achieved

Information Search Strategies among LIS Professionals: A Case Study of Selected Institutions in India

This study examined Information Search Strategies employed by Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals of selected institutions in India for research. Questionnaire was used as the main instrument for the gathering of data. Data collected were analyzed using simple frequency tables and mean. Search specialists can be found in libraries of all kinds, but are located especially in college and university libraries and in the information centre and other special libraries associated with business and industrial organizations, law firms and medical establishments. Some search specialists are freelance entrepreneurs, in business for themselves and actively marketing their services to special user populations. clients of online information retrieval search specialists include undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in academic libraries, and scientists, engineers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and many others using special libraries and information centres to help satisfy their information needs. The study revealed that most of the respondents belonging to various educational qualifications prefer ‘their library catalogue’, except the respondents belonging to ‘UG in LIS’ qualification. Most of the respondents (44.4%) belonging to ‘UG in LIS’ qualification prefer ‘open access databases’ to seek needed information, followed by ‘their library catalogue’ (22.2%). The findings of such study would put light on the important data and insight into the current state of practices of LIS professionals and their understanding about information searching process on internet. The outcome and suggestions of the study would be beneficial for them to take appropriate measures to improve their information search strategy skills

Internet Search Tactics

Purpose Bates' Information Search Tactics have been influential in the practice and teaching of online searching since they were published in 1979. This article is about using information search tactics to search the Internet, and presents a set of tactics useful in the practice and teaching of Internet searching. Design/methodology/approach Tactics used on the Internet were gathered from the literature, websites, and the author's experience of Internet searching. These were compared with the Information Search Tactics, and refined into a set of Internet Search Tactics. Findings The article presents 34 Internet Search Tactics: 18 of the original Bates tactics, interpreted in the context of the Internet, and 16 new tactics. While many of the information search tactics are relevant, effective Internet searching requires recognition of the role of relevancy ranking and full text searching in search engines. The uncontrolled nature of the Internet means that evaluation of information resources is an integral part of Internet searching, so a group of evaluation tactics have been proposed. Practical implications The tactics provide a framework for teaching effective Internet searching. Originality/value Bates' information search tactics do not appear to have been applied as a whole to searching the Internet. The proposed tactics will be useful for librarians and researchers who need to carry out effective searching on the Internet, and for information literacy education. Research into information seeking and search interfaces will be informed by the tactics

Extending information retrieval system model to improve interactive web searching.

The research set out with the broad objective of developing new tools to support Web information searching. A survey showed that a substantial number of interactive search tools were being developed but little work on how these new developments fitted into the general aim of helping people find information. Due to this it proved difficult to compare and analyse how tools help and affect users and where they belong in a general scheme of information search tools. A key reason for a lack of better information searching tools was identified in the ill-suited nature of existing information retrieval system models. The traditional information retrieval model is extended by synthesising work in information retrieval and information seeking research. The purpose of this new holistic search model is to assist information system practitioners in identifying, hypothesising, designing and evaluating Web information searching tools. Using the model, a term relevance feedback tool called ‘Tag and Keyword’ (TKy) was developed in a Web browser and it was hypothesised that it could improve query reformulation and reduce unnecessary browsing. The tool was laboratory experimented and quantitative analysis showed statistical significances in increased query reformulations and in reduced Web browsing (per query). Subjects were interviewed after the experiment and qualitative analysis revealed that they found the tool useful and saved time. Interestingly, exploratory analysis on collected data identified three different methods in which subjects had utilised the TKy tool. The research developed a holistic search model for Web searching and demonstrated that it can be used to hypothesise, design and evaluate information searching tools. Information system practitioners using it can better understand the context in which their search tools are developed and how these relate to users’ search processes and other search tools

An investigation into the ‘I can Google it’ information seeking behaviour of the academic communities in the Maldives and Australia

This thesis is a phenomenological inquiry of the “I can Google it” information seeking behaviour in academic communities from two economically diverse countries – Maldives and Australia. It investigates how the googling phenomenon impacts the provision of academic library services

KidsQuestions: Assisting Children’s Digital Information Seeking

The work presented in this thesis aims at supporting children’s digital information seeking. Children are known to have difficulties effectively using the information technologies that are available to them. We hypothesize that an interaction model specifically designed to align with the inquiry-based pedagogies common in education today would be beneficial for children’s digital information search. This thesis verifies this hypothesis by considering the example of the New Zealand education system. Within this context, a requirements analysis is undertaken involving children, parents, and teachers. Through a range of user studies, we identify the information seeking practices and the issues school children encounter when using contemporary digital information seeking technology. We found that contemporary internet search engines are used regularly during daily educational pursuits, and identify children’s issues constructing and reconstructing search queries, identifying websites that will contain relevant information, and mistaken repeat visiting of websites. Internet search engines do not align with how children are taught to search for information. In particular, inquiry-based learning approaches taught in schools, are not appropriately supported by the available information search systems. We begin addressing our hypothesis by identifying a target age range of children for which support for information seeking could be improved. We also analyse the interfaces of current commercial internet search engines to highlight the design decisions and to assist with the development of requirements. Activity theory is used as a lens to analyse the results of our studies in order to develop a list of requirements for an interaction model for children’s information seeking. These requirements are then used to design our interaction model. To examine this interaction model we developed an interface prototype, KidsQuestions. A final user study evaluates the effectiveness of our interaction model by exploring school children’s use of our KidsQuestions prototype. Our approach to designing a child-oriented interaction model differs from the common approach of using child-specific design devices such as colour, avatars, or results list simplification. Instead, our interaction model explores the requirements for children’s information seeking by aligning with appropriate phases of the inquiry-based learning frameworks children are taught. By addressing the inquiry practices of children through interface elements that support query construction, query reconstruction, along with search planning tools, KidsQuestions can assist children’s digital information seeking. While our interaction model and interface prototype are developed and designed particularly with children in mind, KidsQuestions is not a system that should be considered solely a children’s search engine. We believe that its features can be beneficial to children and adults alike, and future work will investigate the use of our prototype with a wider audience

Semantic contextualisation of social tag-based profiles and item recommendations

Proceedigns of 12th International Conference, EC-Web 2011, Toulouse, France, August 30 - September 1, 2011.The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23014-1_9We present an approach that efficiently identifies the semantic meanings and contexts of social tags within a particular folksonomy, and exploits them to build contextualised tag-based user and item profiles. We apply our approach to a dataset obtained from Delicious social bookmarking system, and evaluate it through two experiments: a user study consisting of manual judgements of tag disambiguation and contextualisation cases, and an offline study measuring the performance of several tag-powered item recommendation algorithms by using contextualised profiles. The results obtained show that our approach is able to accurately determine the actual semantic meanings and contexts of tag annotations, and allow item recommenders to achieve better precision and recall on their predictions.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2008-06566-C04-02), and the Community of Madrid (CCG10- UAM/TIC-5877