What websites do you regularly search and what search-specific features do you use?
I’m going to interpret “sites” to include databases. I am also going to frame my answers in terms of the students I teach. I do most of my searching and teaching in MadCat (my university’s OPAC), Academic Search, and Proquest. I also use Google often, and Amazon on occasion. Another search interface I use frequently is that of the iTunes Music Store.
I have assisted with 17 information literacy/bibliographic instruction sessions in the last month and so I feel I have acquired some valuable knowledge on how students/patrons are conducting searches and how they relate to search interfaces. The features I teach students to use, as called for by the script, include:
- Sorting results by newest first
- Truncation (we spend way to much time explaining that our OPAC uses the question mark, while most databases use the asterisk)
- Boolean operators
- Guided Search (multiple search boxes separated by boolean operators)
What I’ve noticed is how much time is spent teaching students to work with the little anomalies of our OPAC, and how little time is reserved for teaching students to evaluate articles and sources for content and relevancy. Students are also left with little time to practice searching for their own topics, so there is hardly room for students to feel that the search process relates to them and to their needs. Here are the things that students expect our university OPAC to be able to do (and that it isn’t capable of):
- Interpret natural language
- Correct their spelling mistakes
- Skip initial articles like “a” and “the”
- Flag items that are useful (they must learn citation management software)
- Search for alternate endings and plurals of search terms (without using a truncation symbol)
- Suggest search terms
- Search for multiple words as a phrase (without having to enclose words in parentheses)
Oh, how I long for my university to implement an application like VuFind!
How much do you think you know about advanced search features on those sites?
I think as a library school student and an apprentice info. lit. teacher I have a heightened awareness of advanced search features. It doesn’t mean I use them often. I tend to think that if a search interface is effective (for example, it features faceted metadata searching) then the need for an advanced search diminishes. We don’t even cover advanced features in our library course for freshmen, and I’m glad we don’t because I think it would be a waste of their time until catalog interfaces improve. It’s really a backwards notion of expecting users to adapt to the catalog instead of adapting the catalog to users.
What could those sites do to improve?
Well, the first thing MadCat could do is get some good design aesthetics and typography going! White space, bold print, and varied type sizes would vastly improve our OPAC. Searching would be immediately more intuitive and eyestrain would be reduced.
The next step would be the implementation of a search interface like VuFind, which really brings the current OPAC structure, features, and display up to modern visual and technical standards.
