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Librarians as Archaeologists




No, not Dr. Carter. According to Scott Nicholson in "Digital Library Archaeology: a conceptual framework for understanding library use through artifact-based evaluation" librarians have a thing or two to learn from archaeologists. I think all of us in the information field have a thing or two to learn about the way people search, and looking at another fields' examples certainly can't hurt.


"Everyday people" don't go into a library thinking...now what keyword terms can I use to access this item...and oh, yes, I see a "see also" link here, so let me follow that to narrow down my search query...

They can go to google and type in anything they want and get information online. AKA using natural language queries. So why can't library catalogs function this way? I understand we are working toward that, but it doesn't seem to me like information professionals are paying attention to what their users are telling them, either verbally or through their searching.


Daniel Rose says that "Today, we have largely moved away from Boolean query syntax" in "Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior With Search User Interfaces for the Web...but that's not entirely true with library catalogs. We really do need to know how people, not just librarians, look for information. As Nicholson suggested, we should be archaeologists, using digital clues like they use pottery shards (498, 2006). This can get tricky though, because of privacy issues.


Something else that's fun [maybe i am just a geek] is letting people pick your brain to see how you search and navigate information. I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but I participated in this research for WebJunction before, where I got to "think out loud" while navigating this webpage. I felt so awesome! Like I was really contributing to science. But say I followed somebody around watching them search for items in the library- they are bound to feel uncomfortable and change their actual search patterns. Nicholson points out that there are steps that can be taken to combat this (512, 513), but it's always best to observe real people in their environments, if possible.


So about the catalog searching...Rose shows how Altavista is a more user-friendly version of the "see" and "see also" references in the catalog on p. 798 by showing how you can "refine your search" and then listing more focused terms than search term the user entered. I think this could also happen with the library catalog, so FRBR people, keep this in mind!


Anything to get more people using the library, right?

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