We’ve been planning to do some usability studies on our web site this year since it’s been a couple of years since our current site was implemented, and it’s time to check and see if the things that made sense to students a few years ago still make sense to them now. So I was interested to have several interactions with students over the course of the last week or so which indicated that students really are interacting with the site differently now. In short, they’re looking for anything that might look like a search box, and they’re using any and all search boxes in same way. More than at any previous time, I’m noticing that my students expect every single search box to be their point of entry into all library resources. At the same time, when they search through collections of collections, they’re highly frustrated. So what gives? (And I really mean that as a serious question. I simply cannot resolve these two frustrations in my head.)

But leaving that conundrum aside for the moment, here’s what I’ve noticed about the “any search box is the same search box and searches everything” mentality.

First, there was a student last week who was searching our catalog for “information on her topic” when what she clearly needed were newspaper articles, and she knew that. But, you see, we had a search box sitting at the top of our “Find” page, so that’s what she used. It’s quite logical, really. If I didn’t know what “The Bridge” is, the difference between a catalog and a database, or if I just didn’t bother to read the labels, that’s what I’d do too.

Later, another student who knew the difference between catalogs and databases came up because she wasn’t getting any results when she searched our article databases. Well… it turned out she was using the “search for a particular database from this long list of databases” box as if it were, you guessed it, a “search within these databases” search box. And it’s quite logical. That box simply says “search.”

Well, today was the kicker. I was teaching a class, and I got the whole class up into the reference room to actually use the Encyclopedia Britannica and to figure out what other subject encyclopedias might be useful as entries into their topics. I’d just shown them how to navigate Britannica’s index, and then showed them a custom search form I’d made so that they could find subject encyclopeidas to browse. Got that? I’d shown them Britannica. Ok. Well, one student clicked from the course guide I’d made into the catalog record for Britannica, and then was trying to use the search box there to search Britannica for his topic. I guess he figured that would be a much more efficient way than the way I’d just demonstrated. And he’s right… but that’s simply not possible from within our catalogs.

My conclusion? Somehow, every search box is a Google box. Every search box is presumed to query everything. And yet, when search boxes do query everything, the students are frustrated to the point of paralysis with the results they get. So basically, if we are to fix this problem, we need federated search that guides students so expertly through result lists and items and collections that they can actually find what they want in the mess that is “all available information.” Oh, and all content must be digitized. This is (currently) impossible. Which brings me back to my conundrum… what do we do now? with today’s library technology? Or is it just a case of needing to label our search boxes better? …. I’ve got no answers.

Life and work and crazy deadlines on massive projects have all been ganging up on me lately to keep me from posting (or cooking, or doing my dishes, or sleeping much, or… really anything that usually makes up the rhythm of my existence). The bad thing about this is that I’ve never felt quite this overwhelmed before (though it sure is making me look forward to having another librarian join our team!). The good thing is that when so many things happen in such a short space of time, I can see patterns in the kinds of confusion my students face much more easily.

One such typical confusion that’s been brought to the fore in the last couple of weeks has to do with the concept of collections of collections. We deal with this concept all the time in libraries, and in academia in general. We know without thinking that special collections, archives, government documents, journal collections, and teaching collections in individual departments all have their own internal coherence. They have their own rules about what constitutes a relevant description and what doesn’t, what finding aids make sense, and what physical or digital organization makes finding and using the information hum along smoothly. Who would use the world “Carleton” to describe anything held in our archives like they would in our regular book collection? And who would organize our regular books by publisher like they do in gov docs, kind of?

Take that a step further and look at all our bibliographic databases. Some are indexing only (like MLA International Bibliography). Some include abstracts. Some search the full text of the article. Some ONLY search the full text of the article. No matter their structure and search philosophy (because I do think choice of primary access comes down to philosophy most of the time), each database has it’s own internal rhythms and vocabularies, strengths and eccentricities. We’re very used to approaching each new collection, probing it for clues to its vocabularies and strengths, and then mining it for insights into our research problems.

And this is just the way it is. (And incidentally, this is what makes federated search such a bear of a concept… but more on that later, maybe.) We are used to this state of affairs and navigate it as easily as we change our wardrobes to fit new seasons. Which is why, when we encounter digitized collections online, we don’t even blink. Of course they’ll have their own internal rhythms. Of course they’ll resonate to their own vocabularies.

But this isn’t the way the search-engine optimized web works. The new default order of things is that for any given search box to search everything under it in exactly the same way with consistent results. (I know, I know. This isn’t how it actually happens. But it is what people think happens, which is more to the point.) So faced with a portal like, for example, American Memory, what are students to think but that entering search terms in that little search box will search through all of the content and bring back relevance-ranked results? And yet, American Memory is a collection of collections, just like our library here on campus is a collection of collections. That search box is almost entirely useless and is causing students no end of frustration. They see result lists that are either 0 or 9 bazillion, and both results bother them so much that they’ve been coming the reference desk in droves to find out what they’re doing wrong. They’re confused and frustrated, and they absolutely “know” that the fault lies with their search abilities rather than with the problem of having a cute little search box that is desperately trying to search the contents of hundreds of collections that have about as much in common as Medline and the MLA International Bibliography, or as our musical recordings and our map collection. Up until this point in their lives, Google has searched web pages for them and delivered understandable results. They’ve never before had to consider the implications and complications that discrete collections present.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, explaining the concept of collections of collections, and explaining how to use the cute little search box to find collections rather than items has relieved frustration so far.)

Yesterday, as students filed in and out of my office in a continuous stream, two of them asked questions that made me thank my lucky stars I’d taken that elective cataloging and classification course back in library school. Without it, I would have been mostly stumped yesterday.

Here’s why. Not only did the experience of taking cataloging and classification force me to realize that I’m geeky enough to get a kick out of AACR2 and mapping it to MARC, but I also learned that I’m very very bad at classification. It’s not that I can’t figure out what books are about…most of the time. I just could never reconcile myself to the idea that, because of the historical need to save space on those catalog cards or print indexes, the rules for applying subject terms seem to inhibit that gathering function that Cutter listed among his 3 primary objectives for the catalog. (For my non-librarian friends, these objectives are: allowing people to locate particular books, help them gather together related items, and help them make informed decisions about what they want.) Specifically, the problem lies in the rule that states that if you have a hierarchically related set of subject terms, you must apply the most specific term that applies to the entire work. You may not also apply the broader terms higher up the hierarchical structure. Similarly, if two or more of the more specific terms apply to your work, you cannot apply both. Instead, you have to look upward in the hierarchical structure until you reach a term that can apply to the entire work.

So what does this have to do with my appointments yesterday? Well, twice yesterday I had students come in frustrated and worried that their topics weren’t viable (and these were the topics for their senior theses, so they were a little stressed). They’d plunked terms into the MLA International Bibliography and only retrieved 2 or 3 hits! Here’s an example that’s an amalgam of a couple of students yesterday. Try finding articles on Elena Garro and gender in the MLA-IB. A good student will know to flip the author’s name around and search it as a subject. A good student will also find some synonyms for “gender” (which I won’t list here for fear of Google). This good student will get about 3 hits from MLA. Three hits?!? How can you write a thesis with this little to go on? And this from the database that’s custom-made for searching literary topics.

These students correctly assumed that more must have been written on the topic. And finally, after poking around for a while, we discovered that more people were writing about Garro’s work and some aspect of gender… specifically, either the male or female gender. This means that the indexers who saw articles about Garro’s portrayal of femininity could not also add the subject term “gender” because, remember, you can’t have both narrow and broad terms describing the same work. This means that students interested in gender have to include narrow and broad terms in their search. In a Google-safe example, if you replace “gender” with “women OR femininity OR gender OR manhood OR masculinity”OR “men” you suddenly get 42 results. And if we probed for other gender-related words, I’m sure we’d get even more results.

My two students had the same reaction when I explained this phenomenon: “What?!? Crazy! Why can’t they add the other terms?” Why indeed? We aren’t restricted by those 3×5 cards any more. We aren’t publishing the MLA-IB as a yearly print index any more. We’re simply adding relationships in a database.

I’m thankful to these two students for reminding me of what I’d learned back in my cataloging class. Now that I’ve been reminded, I’m planning to include discussion and examples of this phenomenon in my next instruction session, and probably in many of my sessions in the future. I bet my own searching skills will be greatly improved from now on, as well. Funny how it takes a real-life frustration to teach me what I should have known all along…

Two years into being a lit librarian (as well as 6 years of studying literature and writing literary criticism of various sorts and levels), I finally realized what makes literary research so hard. All these poor students are looking for research about their literary works, and they want examples of criticism that approach those works from particular theoretical frameworks. But the MLA International Bibliography and other databases for literary research don’t index by theoretical perspective. I can’t ask it for New Historicist readings of Daisy Miller, for example. And because of this I can’t easily figure out quite what New Historicism is, or who the key scholars were/are, or flesh out a “history of criticism on this piece” kind of literature review.

And I can understand why this is the case. I mean, can you imagine the overhead involved in making decisions about what theory/theories are represented in an article, applying this to a databases as massive as the MLA International Bibliography, or updating the constantly changing terminology associated with literary theory? And yet, this is one of the three primary query-types I’m asked to help with (the other two being “things interpreting this work” and “things characterizing this author.”)

It strikes me that this could be one of those perfect uses for social tagging in research databases. But until then, these poor students are in for a long and frustrating stint of following up on citations, using Web of Knowledge to develop a better feel for the network of scholars writing from a particular theoretical framework, and generally having to move beyond the now-normal task of picking articles with interesting titles from result lists.

In other words, I think that in many ways, the skills required for good literary research are still some of the least translatable into the electronic world. And these skills will probably continue to be much more based on building up vast internal schemata of authors and publishers then on boolean searching until a) databases add indexing about theoretical frameworks or b) MLA (and others) goes social and let us help them describe these works of criticism in ways that are useful to literary critics.